


Good Morning, Madam President

by Eloisa



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: Action/Adventure, BAMF Women, Gen, Guerrilla Warfare, Hurt/Comfort, Infiltration, Politics, Post-Canon, Selphie Tilmitt Is Devious, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2020-12-17 14:48:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 37,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21056183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eloisa/pseuds/Eloisa
Summary: Rinoa Heartilly realises that the only way that she can achieve permanent independence for Timber is to take over Galbadia. What with an ongoing guerilla war, a populist movement, and a familiar face in Galbadia's higher military echelons, it's a good thing she has five close-as-glue friends to help her. Contains graphic violence and Selphie Tilmitt on caffeine.





	1. In Vino Veritas

**Author's Note:**

> Hello; I am supposed to be finishing two other projects but instead I'm writing FFVIII thriller. Sue me.  
I wrote this with the background assumptions of Squall/Rinoa and Irvine/Selphie, but as I had a sizeable itch to write gen and ensemble fic, there is near-zero romance here.  
As of 17th October 2019 I've drafted thirteen chapters of a prospective 21, not all of them consecutive.  
I will put specific content warnings on each chapter where they are needed. No warnings are required for chapter 1 or 2, for instance.  
Everything belongs to Square Enix.

Maybe it was the champagne talking, maybe the duty unpaid bottle of Galbadian malt whisky Irvine produced from a back pocket, all smoke in the tastebuds and fire in the throat; or maybe it was the adrenaline of the evening and the release of incalculable stress that had pursued them all for months (or eternities. With time compression had come a new temporal vocabulary). For whatever reason, or no reason, as the evening darkened and the umpteenth round of fireworks coloured the sky over Balamb Garden, Squall, busy wrapping a pink carnation spray over Rinoa’s ear, aired some words on the Timber situation.

“There isn’t a long-term solution.”

“Then you’re stuck with me,” Rinoa slurred into the flowers.

“Trabia’s independent,” Selphie pointed out. She was wearing a paper garland wrapped seven or eight times round her torso. Irvine’s hat, now topped by a plastic chocobo, was perched over her left ear. “Its territory’s a comparable size. It has fewer natural resources.”

Squall extended his left hand. It appeared to have at least eight fingers, but he’d cope for the time being. “Firstly, Trabia has more natural _defences_. Mountains. Blue dragons.” He raised one finger, then another. “Secondly, Trabia is next to recently-isolationist Esthar. Thirdly…” He added another finger, or two, possibly. “Thirdly, those natural resources are a magnet for Galbadia. SeeD can drive out the Galbadians. They would just come back.”

“Sorceress,” Rinoa hiccuped.

“None of us are immortal. They would come back. You could ask Esthar for a mutual defence treaty, but who’s to say that would last longer than their current president?” Though Laguna had been in power for seventeen years, he couldn’t stay that way forever. _‘We have a lot to talk about,’ _he had said, with Esthar City glittering behind him. Maybe, before too long, Squall would run out of excuses to avoid going back. “Esthar can’t change Galbadia’s attitude to expansion on its own. That has to come from within.”

“Like, pacifist policies imposed by the Galbadian president?” Irvine said, reclaiming his hat in the face of Selphie’s squeaks. A SeeD field exam certificate was pinned to his coat lapel. Seemed that taking down a time-bending sorceress counted as a pass.

“Exactly, and held there long enough for the attitude to stick.”

Rinoa shrugged. “OK, then; it’s simple.”

“What is?”

“I’ll just have to become president of Galbadia.”

*

Ten hours, six _Esuna_ spells and a lot of bacon sandwiches later, the saviours of all space and time clustered around a desk in the Library. Rinoa was wearing Irvine’s hat this time, pulled low over her eyes, and Irvine had Selphie’s garland hanging off his forehead.

“Never again,” Zell muttered into his hands, “Never again...”

Quistis closed the Balamb Garden copy of _Structures of Galbadian Government and Constitution_ with a bang. She was wearing prescription sunglasses, and her uniform blouse was on inside out. “Candidates for the presidency of Galbadia have to be citizens in good standing, aged a minimum of twenty-one years on election day.”

Rinoa shrugged. “That’s OK. I’m a citizen, and I’ve never… well, I’ve never been convicted of anything.”

“You’re still seventeen.”

“Then I have time to learn about Galbadian governance issues.”

“Such as the _issue_ that there hasn’t been an election in Galbadia for twenty years?” Quistis suggested. “Seven-year presidential terms are in the constitution just as clearly as the age limit.”

“I never thought this would be easy.”

*

_Four years later_

Rinoa set down her phone and smiled at its call-ended screen. Forget sorcery and time compression – mobile radio and satellite technologies were true marvels.

From the tone of their chat, Laguna had his part rehearsed to perfection. Squall, with Rinoa’s introductions in place, had spent two years quietly talking to resistance groups in Timber: they were ready. Those of Galbadia’s other occupied territories in which she had contacts – the Humphrey Archipelago, the rolling Shenand Hills – were happy to throw in their support. Best of all, Galbadia, if it took the bait, wouldn’t associate her with the diplomatic preparations until too late.

She smiled at the open window and the sea spray splashing up outside. What good fortune that her knight had turned out to be the Esthari president’s long-lost son.

Squall came up behind her and bent over her shoulder. “Laguna’s happy with the timing?”

“Absolutely. He’d like to see you –”

“His usual state of being, whether we’re meant to be reviewing Lunar Cry cleanup or taste-testing Palace brownie recipes.” He perched on the edge of her bed beside her. “Xu’s had another report from Hummingbird.” Her anonymous source inside the Galbadian Army. “He reckons –”

“Or she,” Rinoa pointed out.

“I’ve seen a grand total of three Galbadian female soldiers. Hummingbird reckons Galbadia is catching up with Esthar faster than would be expected from normal channel communication. He – or she – surmises they have a source inside Esthar’s military research division.”

Rinoa sat up straighter. “Then you do need to see Laguna. Now. Urgently. I need Galbadia a bit more desperate than that.”

“I’m not asking my father to declare war on Galbadia just to throw them into a panic.”

“Leave it as a reserve option.” Rinoa lay backwards and stared up at the ceiling. White paint, white roses round the lampshade, clean sea air trickling inside: Balamb Garden, quiet and orderly and, for the moment, utterly absent explosions, screaming, and chaos. (Xu and Quistis, now Head of Administration and Headmistress respectively, were too close to each other to fight over many things.) The Garden was a calm oasis in a desert of warfare.

Given that the most recent Sorceress War had created enough orphans to fill three new Gardens, rather than just the reconstructed Trabia Garden and a Galbadia Garden that now ran an active SeeD programme, the world had decided that Balamb Garden was the safest place to keep the only-known sorceress alive, specifically right underneath SeeD’s battlefield commander’s nose. The world had better accept the change that was coming. Timber needed it.

“If Esthar were to make Galbadia think that a new tech was on the horizon,” she said, “something an order of magnitude more advanced - that would provoke just the reaction I need. Or we could throw civilian space exploration onto the table instead.”

“There’s no such thing as civilian space exploration.”

“Then there should be. There could be. Mutual peace treaty in orbit space, scientific missions, maybe putting SeeD on the moon to kill monsters there and end Lunar Cry disasters…”

Squall frowned. “Would the Galbadian Army take that as a positive?”

“The interim president would. He’s full of ideas about puffing up his own importance. A space mission with his name on it would be perfect for him.” Rinoa smiled. Flower petals danced from the bush in her windowbox onto the breeze and into her hand. “We have options. Options give us lift off.”

*


	2. A Morning Constitutional

“Free and fair elections.”

As soon as Laguna spoke, the Galbadian delegation irrupted. Quistis, sitting at her Official Observer’s desk with Balamb Garden’s banner skirting her legs, kept eyes on not the interim president but the Army senior staff surrounding him. General Hyder and General Arwan both rose to their feet, full of imprecations: General Caraway appeared to urge the interim president to calm: the final officer, General Markham of Army Intelligence, sat stone-faced, as if he had already known what Esthar would demand – or wanted it to be thought that he did.

Between them, Interim President Hahn resembled a piglet, tiny eyes and a bulging jaw and a little squeaking voice of protest. He was Vinzer Deling’s son – Galbadian surnames were matronymic – and played heavily on the connection for his authority. The assorted generals might not have kept him in power this long if he had had his father’s brains.

Watch the generals, and she would know the true Galbadian reaction.

“This is nonsense!” General Hyder shouted. “Galbadian executive power will not be polluted by –”

“Hey, I voted in the last Galbadian election,” Laguna cut in. “How many of you all bothered?” Hyder had the sense to look embarrassed.

“Conditions of upheaval,” General Arwan snorted, “require special measures. As I recall, you, President Loire, were appointed unopposed during conditions of upheaval.”

“Been elected twice since,” Laguna said with a dreamy smile. “We had to unify Esthar first, of course. Those east coast villages kept sending back peacekeepers in body bags till we finally convinced them Adel wasn’t in charge any more. Fun times. But, hey. No war at the moment. No better time for it.”

“This isn’t a tea party,” Caraway cautioned. “It is a serious step in Galbadia’s future.”

“Well, elections have a lot of benefits over tea parties. You don’t get so many people in Tonberry suits turning up to tea parties, and the champagne’s better at elections.” Laguna shrugged. “Besides, you could never throw a tea party that would take Galbadia as far forward, in one move, as this will.”

General Hyder laughed. “The notion that Galbadia’s friendship is for sale is pitiful.

“Hey, neither’s ours,” Laguna said, throwing up his hands in pique fake or real. His left little finger came within fractions of knocking his water glass off the table. One of his aides slid the glass sideways, further out of range, without changing expression. “We’re making all the ground here. Joint military exercises! R&D meetings! A spaceport in Galbadia! Here you are, making out like I’m trying to steal your children –”

“Galbadia accepts.”

The rest of the Galbadian delegation turned to General Markham with eyes widening. The Intelligence head nodded. “Military cooperation between Galbadia and Esthar is a vital opportunity for the entire world. That will not change, no matter who holds the presidency of Galbadia. I have full confidence in Interim President Hahn to play his role as an election candidate.” Hahn’s face turned pink, then purple. Markham’s expression did not change.

General Arwan nodded slowly. His purview was what Galbadia referred to as ‘combat services’; Army Logistics, Medical and the Engineering Corps. Maybe his mind had leapt to Esthar’s cyborg technology. “I too have confidence in Interim President Hahn. But an election cannot be organised overnight. We have ballot papers to prepare, information to disseminate to citizens, staff to hire to count the papers or whatever happens –”

Quistis turned to page 73 in her copy of _Structures of Galbadian Government and Constitution_. “Galbadia’s election regulations cite a six week period between announcement of election and election day.” Arwan glared at her. “Candidates,” Quistis continued, “may announce their candidacy at any time between the announcement of elections and the date twenty-eight days prior to the election, upon presentation to the electoral services officer of the signatures of one hundred Galbadian citizens aged over eighteen years prepared to support that candidate, and of a deposit of ten thousand gil, refundable on condition that the candidate’s demeanour remains, throughout the election campaign, in line with the law and customs of Galbadia surrounding elections.”

Hahn laughed, a hysterical sound. “So anyone with a few gil and a hundred friends can challenge my right to presidency? That’s absurd.” Caraway held his breath, and Markham’s face grew more redolent of an ancient Centran statue. Laguna, meanwhile, leant slightly forwards with a ‘_do-tell_’ expression. “My father built Galbadia into what it now is. A powerhouse. All-conquering. I don’t intend to give it up!”

“Great!” Laguna said. “Sounds like you’re in!” Hahn spluttered again. “We usually ask the Shumi down as neutral observers for our presidential elections,” Laguna continued. “They’re used to the job: you could consider them.” Blank expressions graced the Galbadian side of the table. To be fair, Balamb’s mayoral elections were the closest Quistis had come to democratic observance, and they were a lot less high-profile and less formal.

“Observers…?” enquired Arwan.

Laguna nodded, an excited sheepdog. “Make sure no groups of voters are prevented from voting by, for instance, holding the elections while half the voters are at work or while the temples are having a festival: checking that no ballot papers are destroyed, for instance from areas that can’t stand the current presidency, or making sure that falsified ballot papers aren’t being stuffed into counting boxes by the electoral staff – oh, it happens,” he said with a sagacious nod. “First time out, a few of Adel’s old staff tried to get her reelected. You’d think that having frozen her and launched her into space would be enough, but, no. You need observers. And security for the candidates. Independent security.”

Eyes swivelled towards Quistis. “Headmistress Trepe,” General Caraway said, expression as diffident as if he had never hired her to assassinate the leader of any country let alone his own, “is Balamb Garden prepared to provide security for all candidates in this election?”

Quistis nodded. “We are prepared to provide _personal _security. Were, for example, rogue military divisions belonging to _any_ entity to intervene, our remit would extend to withdrawing our assigned candidates to Garden properties. At that point, SeeD as a body would be in a position to nullify the threat.”

“And would you, personally, be willing to remain present in Deling City during the election period in order to oversee the security operation?”

A tiny part of the tension in her shoulders relaxed. “Yes, General. I will.”

*

Balamb Garden’s car park observation deck was deserted: a few sounds drifted through its open door from the Training Centre adjacent, cadets and instructors in battle, sweethearts making out in the secret area. Selphie popped open a fourth official SeeD car’s boot and checked its contents. Spare ammo, generic, two boxes. Spare ammo, Dark Ammo, one box. Remedies, ten. X-potions, five. Field medical kit, bright green, one. Inflatable emergency shelter, bright orange, one. She ticked off the car on her clipboard’s checklist. Only another eighteen to go!

Time to take a break first. Maybe eighteen months had been too long to take out of active service, leaving her a little on the lazy side, but Trabia had needed her. She closed the boot lid, climbed the brief ladder to the observation deck and wandered outside. Gulls cawed in the misty morning. The autumn breeze carried a chill that wreathed round her legs. She perched on the edge of the deck, legs swinging over its edge towards the dark sea below, and stared at Esthar’s rocky eastern coast floating by.

Footsteps clinked, inside on the car park flooring, and ascended the ladder. Selphie shifted sideways to make room for Squall to sit beside her. They watched the seagulls together in silence.

“OK,” she said a few minutes later. “What gives?”

“I’ll send a tannoy for you later, and will order you up for a solo recon in Trabia. The mission instructions I’ll give you then are all false.”

She glanced at him. Brooding on something or other. He had way too much to brood about, but he’d surely relax a bit more if he smiled a bit more. “So I won’t have backup.”

“No.”

“And if my emergency beacon goes off it’ll show up in the wrong place, and Records will pitch a fit and refuse to send assistance to the right place.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Squall gave off a little frustrated sigh. “You have two mission objectives. Your first objective is to observe testing of some alleged new Galbadian tanks.”

“Alleged?”

“We have a source in the G-Army –”

“Hummingbird.”

“Yes. The source has been accurate in the past. I find this particular report very hard to believe, though. It shouldn’t be possible for Galbadia’s rocketry to have progressed this quickly. You’re experienced in ballistics and infiltration: you’re the ideal person for the job.”

“So why can’t I receive my orders openly?”

“I’m concerned that Hummingbird might be playing us – might have his, or her as Rinoa always reminds me, own source inside Garden. I don’t want Hummingbird to find out we checked. Even if Hummingbird is legit, he – or she – might become offended.”

“Hummingbird never found Seifer for you,” Selphie pointed out to the sea and the gulls.

Squall snorted. “Didn’t feed me any nonsense about him either. Not that we know he’s still in the G-Army –”

“Kerry and Dianne definitely traced him that far, and there aren’t many places he could have gone after that. If he’d been KIA or discharged, you’d think Hummingbird would have said.”

“Seifer was never the sort of man to settle for insignificance if he could help it. I doubt he’s anywhere near the Army now.” Squall shook his head. “Enough of that. Your second objective is your part in the larger picture –” by which he meant the Timber job – “at which you can’t arrive in Garden transport.”

“You _finally_ decided? What do I get?”

In oblique answer, he slipped a tiny packet from his pocket and handed it over to her. “Garden rents a few apartments in Deling City, via a couple of shell companies to hide the names on the docket.” Nothing unusual: Garden did the same thing in Esthar City, despite, or possibly because of, Laguna’s insistence that the entirety of SeeD was welcome at the Presidential Palace at any time. “That’s the key to one of them. Yours for a couple of months.

“Quistis will be in Deling City as security observer. Zell’s going to be bodyguarding Rinoa for the duration. It strikes me – us – that having a reliable investigative journalist on site during the Galbadian elections would be invaluable, especially one skilled in infiltration as well as talking too much, and bearing in mind all the fun you had collating Laguna’s old articles, and the reams of content you produce for us every festival-time…”

Selphie squeaked in delight. One of the gulls, which had perched on the guard rail in hopes of a crisp or two, took flight. “The perfect job!” She flung her arms round him. He grunted as if she’d knocked the air out of him, but a smile creased his lips. “Tell me Irvine’s my liaison.”

“Yes and no. Irvine’s heading on ‘shore leave’ to Deling City. Records will show that he is on undercover assignment. He will communicate with you via dead drop, and semi-openly with Zell and Quistis. Anyone watching their movements will assume that he’s the background operative. They’ll miss you entirely.”

Well, she’d be _near_ him, and that was the next best thing. “OK. What will you want me to produce?”

“There’s one presidential candidate already announced.”

“The interim president. Brycen Hahn.”

Squall frowned. “He’s been ‘interim’ for four years. Yes, him. From the furore already coming out of the faction that thinks Hahn is entirely too lackadaisical and liberal to govern Galbadia, I expect a candidate from their side as well, when the hustings take place in a fortnight. Whoever that turns out to be, and whoever else runs, I want front page stories about their tax fiddles, private business mismanagement, treasury fraud in Hahn’s case… anything embarrassing. Hahn has always struck me as the kind of man who corners the waitresses halfway through a presidential banquet.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Caught him cornering a waitress halfway through the banquet gracing the last diplomatic attempts between Galbadia and Esthar.”

Selphie screwed up her face. Yuck. “Well, that one’s easy enough. One Deling-based news shock site. Two more that pretend to be Deling-based but are being run out of Trabia Garden. That’s also an easy angle.” Squall looked vaguely shocked. “We need physical press. _Timber Maniacs_ wouldn’t take political exposés nowadays.”

“They might if you suckered them in with something non-embarrassing for Hahn. Go through Laguna to get stories out in physical format. He owns the _Dollet Times_ and the _Old Centrarian_, and knows the owner of the _Esthar City Journal_. That one will like any financial irregularity stories you dig up.” He tapped her hand. “I stress, I’d prefer genuine scandals over inventions – or incidents that, in Balamb or Trabia or Dollet, would be seen as scandals. I’ve no idea what counts as scandal in Galbadia any more.”

“No problem. It’ll be a piece of cake.” Selphie grinned at the sun on the waters. Physically easy assignment, getting to do lots of one of her favourite activities…

“I trust your resourcefulness. It’s the tank test part that worries me. You’ll be well away from any help there.”

“Well, you’ll know where I am.”

He shook his head. “I’ll be in the field, solo and incommunicado. I won’t be in any position to call in backup for you.”

Selphie glared at him. “Forget about me for a second; who’ll be keeping an eye on you?”

He shrugged. “Someone has to take a risk.”

She glanced down into the car park – no one had come in: no one would come in, with the Garden at sea, unless, like her, they’d been sent to check equipment – and sideways towards the Training Centre to the right and dormitory deck areas to the left. “Where are you going?” she whispered.

“Straight to Timber.”

“_Again_?”

“The resistance groups keep seeing the same face, and they’ve come to trust it. Not much, but, I hope, enough.”

She slid an arm round his waist and leant on his shoulder. “You got a lead at last?” He’d been at this, on and off, for almost as many years as Rinoa had been prepping her part in the job.

Hyne, listen to her. It sounded like the six of them were planning to knock off a country.

For that matter, they were planning to knock off a country.

“I’m there this time. I think. I hope.”

*


	3. In War, All Are Losers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: mention of violence against civilians in warfare.

Squall drove out of Timber as the sun rose towards noon, in a rented car, with the radio station favoured by the previous driver – easy listening and jazz standards – blaring to the countryside. The Galbadian soldiers patrolling the city entrance gave him a sour look as he passed the checkpoint, but shook him down only for the usual fifty gil ‘exit permit’.

The Forest Foxes’ leader had given him strict instructions, as he sat in her kitchen eating plum cake with her child’s noisy play audible in the street outside. Drive to the lakeshore, get out at the café cabins, pretend to admire the view for a while, leave a black rucksack on the car seat. No other colour than black (brand logos were acceptable. SeeD’s logo was not). Get back in the car and head to the closest westward village, Blackstream. There was no inn, but there was a guesthouse. Stay there for one night. If no one made contact, return to her in Timber.

Trees lined the road, many still summer-green, others with leaves goldening in the year’s fade and blowing free in the wind. Seeds, many of them air-light, others the heavy sort that children used as pretend hand grenades (Garden children, anyway), littered the verges. The air was heavy and warm and scented with grass.

Grass and cordite… Squall eased the car into a lower gear for the next checkpoint. There would be more. There would be plenty more.

Many of Timber’s ancient forests had been logged over the last fifteen years, and new waterways, both canals built for logging use and streams diverted across new-ploughed farmland, cut across fields and underneath roadbeds. Here and there Squall passed a tumbledown village abandoned to weeds or a farm building lost to fire. Here and there he passed a side road signposted not to a tiny village, one of the hundreds of tiny villages scattered across the landscape, but to a Galbadian Army installation. DANGER. NO TRESPASSING.

It was all so ham-fisted, and had been ever since he had seen the first incursions up close through Laguna’s eyes. No wonder there were so many resistance groups...

Too many, and half refused to speak to the other half. The Foxes rubbed shoulders with the Badgers, but disdained the Wildcats (“Cats and dogs don't mix”) and Squirrels. The Squirrels hated the Ospreys. The Badgers allied with, along with the Foxes, the Woodpeckers, but were at odds with the Pine Martens. The only figure set apart from the petty rivalries was the Forest Stag.

So Squall just needed to unearth him.

He reached Obel Lake’s shore as the sun peaked. The café was just closing for a brief cleaning break, the proprietor said with a rueful smile for him and for the muddy bootmarks on her floor, but she could make him a coffee if he would like…? No, no charge, she was sorry to have put him to inconvenience (the latter said with a nervous glance for the nearby soldiers patrolling the lakeshore). He paid her extra anyway – it was worth it not to be thought of as in league with the Galbadians – and wandered out to the lake.

Trees had once ringed it, but to the west, stumps were all that remained, and a new road, a red-striped military-only road leading to an Army Air Corps airstrip, snaked off into the distance. Ducks splashed along the lakeshore, diving underwater for their lunch, skirting the slicks of oil that darkened the western waters to spread out, dilute but no less menacing, into the lake proper. It would feed into rivers further down the watershed…

Galbadia might want Timber, but it certainly didn’t treat Timber as a worthwhile part of Galbadia.

After he felt he’d stared at the lake for long enough to alarm the patrolling soldiers, he returned to his car and drove away to the west. Two Army checkpoints followed, on either side of new-prepared farmland. Squall glanced down each tiny lane he passed, but no habitation swum out of fields and trees. He carried on.

Five miles down the road, far enough that he began to fear he had missed the village, the road ended in a three way junction. He drove up to the road sign and peered. Southwest to Timber. Northwest to West Oak Bend. Back the way he’d come for Obel Village. Squall sighed. Maybe there would be a sign to Blackstream from West Oak Bend.

Maybe he needed to retake Basic Orientation.

The trees alongside the road gave way after half a mile to stump-filled fields, new-filled earth, and, further along the road, a group of farm buildings that looked quite new but were already in poor repair. Farmers, here, were often supporters of Vinzer Deling (or lately his son, Brycen Hahn), granted land for services rendered. Stopping at a farm to ask directions would be the worst of moves.

The road meandered on, following a little river’s course. A stand of trees remained on the opposite bank from the road, to the river’s west. In another half mile they came to an abrupt halt. The road, on the east bank, continued. Squall accelerated. There were no other vehicles around. West Oak Bend must be a particularly quiet locale…

The road curved west and over a humpback bridge. Blackened ruins slid out of the evening mist. Squall slowed, and, as the fire-damaged ruins continued thicker and thicker, parked the car and climbed out.

Ruins of houses lined deserted streets. A couple of shops. A schoolhouse. A tiny shrine to a local lake spirit: a picture vaguely resembling Leviathan was still visible at the back of the ruin, in ceramic tiles half popped in fragments by blaze-heat.

The bodies were in the village square, near the inn’s ruins and the cenotaph to locals killed in twenty-year gone conflict with Esthar. Some were charred: most were not, hanging from stakes in grisly configuration, stakes made from local wood. Small children’s corpses lay at the adults’ feet.

All the trees that had once enclosed the village had been logged.

Squall had seen such sights before, in his quiet forays up and down Timber’s environs. This, though, was a little different. The fires were cold and the bodies seemed to have been dead for a couple of weeks. Ordinarily he would have expected them to have been taken down and disposed of by now, tossed in some mass grave by the Army or buried decently by resistance groups, and Army earth-movers to come in and clear the land for farming.

One of the dead bodies had a paper pinned to its chest. Squall, muttering a brief apology, reached up and retrieved it.

PRODUCE THE STAG, it read.

Squall retrieved his car, drove through the village and past the brief clearing, back into the woods.

In another mile or two he entered another village, signposted East Oak Bend at its entrance. The sun was falling behind the trees. A few children stopped their play, chasing a ball in the street, to watch his car and point. “Is there an inn here?” he called to them. One of them stuck a dirty finger in her mouth and pointed leftwards down a side street.

The inn, with a wooden bunch of grapes hanging outside as a sign, had room for him and, in a side garage, his car. He stowed his innocent luggage in a warm and clean bedroom decorated in woodland chintz, fingered the paperback books provided for bedside entertainment, decided that Galbadian-authored romance was not suited to the situation, and, after a brief pause to lay fine hairs across door and window, repaired downstairs. As the elderly landlady provided him with roast chicken and forest vegetables, he confessed his inability to find Blackstream.

“I had a lead on some work there.”

The old lady tutted. “No, you won’t find it. Blackstream’s been cleared. Just this week. The signs are down and the earth’s been turned; you probably drove straight past it.”

The landlady bustled off. Squall ate slowly, staring out of the window at the village darkening in the sunset. He would have to return to Timber and the Forest Foxes’ leader. There would be another chance to meet up with the Forest Stag.

Except that this meeting had taken a year to coordinate, and he only had weeks left before the elections.

He pushed his empty plate aside. A little girl trotted out of the kitchen area to clear the table. “Hello,” Squall said, looking down at her askew dark pigtails and frown of concentration. “Are you the landlady’s granddaughter?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m from West Oak.”

The ruined village. So some, at least, had managed to run. “What happened there?”

“The Galbadians decided they didn’t want a village to be there. So there isn’t a village there.” The little girl screwed up her nose as if she thought he was particularly foolish. “At least I’ve got Aunt Berry and Uncle Nenu. Shilly and Marnie didn’t have anyone.”

“Where are they?”

The child shrugged. “A soldier said he would take them to Deling City. They were too hungry to remember. Never go with soldiers.” She wandered off.

The old lady, Berry, brought over an apple pie and a shot of whisky. “Don’t mind Milais,” she murmured. “She does odd jobs here and there. When she’s a little bigger she can be more useful, but for now, she can fetch and carry.”

The child was maybe four years old. “Her parents...?” Squall murmured.

“Her mother was pregnant. Out here.” Berry mimed a third trimester stomach. “She couldn’t run: she was having a bad time of it.” She fell silent, staring out of the window into the trees. “It was easier before so many trees were felled. More room to hide. You know, they always tell a pregnant woman what she'd been going to have, wave the little body at her before…” She sighed. “The father, he forgot he had to make Milais his number one. He went to the commandant to protest.”

Squall stared at his whisky glass. “I worked with the Forest Owls a while ago,” he murmured to it.

“A long while, I gather.” The old lady laughed. “Forest Pine Martens, they’re the main crew round here. The Forest Badgers run from here to Timber – they’re in league with some folk down there: Foxes, I think – and of course you’ve got the Forest Ospreys, north of us.”

“And the Forest Stag.”

“Ah, the Stag. Some folk say he’s a rumour. Others say they’ve met him at midnight at the wheel of a stolen ammunition truck. But how would anyone really know? Maybe a half dozen men and women call themselves the Forest Stag, and only the ones whose tricks come off add to the tale. Eat your apple pie, dear, before it goes cold.” She bustled off.

Squall obeyed, though the sweet curd seemed bitter in his mouth. While resistance groups played internecine politics, the Galbadian army could rely on its own cohesion plus support from imported citizenry from Galbadia proper.

And the only possible unifying figure might not even exist.

He paid his supper bill and returned to his bedroom. The thin hair he’d left across the lock’s tumbler was still in place. He absolutely had to find the Forest Stag and persuade him – or her – to convince the major resistance groups that, in the unlikely event of Galbadian troops withdrawing, they should come together in a peaceful assembly: he was running out of time…

He sniffed. Someone had been in here. Not a chambermaid. Chambermaids didn’t often smoke cigars in guest bedrooms. Nor would a chambermaid have replaced the hair across the door – just let it fall or cleaned it up.

Squall backed up to the door and looked round the bedroom with fresh eyes. No footprints on the floorboards or crush marks on the rug. The edge of his bedspread was turned exactly as he had left it, to the tiniest fraction. A tiny hair was still trapped under the window’s sash, as it had been in the door. The bathroom window was too small for anyone larger than the orphaned Milais to enter.

He bent to his knees and, yard by yard, inspected the room. Had that tiny scuff on the floor been there earlier? Was that dresser under the eaves a tiny bit out of place?

Was he imagining the whole issue? A passer-by could have stopped for a quick smoke below his bedroom window…

One of the Galbadian romantic thrillers on the little shelf near the bed was out of line with the others. Squall crossed to the shelf, bent and eased it out into his hand. _Deling Buck_, it was called.

It fell open and a scrap of notepaper fluttered out, along with a tiny scrap of cigar ash.

_Under the East Oak._

In place of a signature was a tiny drawing of a deer.

*


	4. Waltz For The Throne

As the SeeD limo crested the last rise and Deling City came into view ahead, Rinoa swallowed a shiver of excitement. Years of study, of cultivating connections in the social sphere in which she’d been raised and in the occupied regions: months of writing and rewriting manifestos and mission statements: weeks of rehearsal for every counter-move she and her friends could think of that the Army and wider Galbadian society might make… and it all started now.

“Looking forward to it?” Zell, beside her, said.

“Yes! Wouldn’t you be?”

“I don’t know; I’m not a great fan of running anything except a race for the hot dogs at lunchtime. Leave that to you and Squall and Quisty.” He stretched his legs out and flexed his arm muscles. “I’m going to enjoy you enjoying it.” She smiled and leant her head on his shoulder.

Quistis, on Zell’s far side, closed the panel between the front seat – holding the SeeD driving and the three others assigned to candidate personal security – and the car’s rear. “It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that Hummingbird may try to make contact with us,” she said quietly. “Be keen for any approaches by, say, junior officers from Intelligence and related branches.”

“What do you want us to say if they do?” Zell asked.

“Err on the friendly side for now. There are no prearranged meetings, no code words we’ve been given. I’m just aware that Hummingbird may want to meet the people for whom he’s been risking so much.”

“Or she,” Rinoa added.

“Or she. Yes. Or she.”

Zell hummed under his breath. “Xu runs this agent solo, yeah?” Quistis nodded. “For cash? For what?”

“Not for cash.” A slight smile crested her lips. “I would see the payments going out of Garden’s accounts. Squall and I once authorised a minor information exchange. Genuine data, but nothing that could be too harmful to Garden. Other than that, no recompense.” He pulled a sceptical face at her. “Nothing other than promise of a safe harbour in the event of discovery,” Quistis amended. “They’ve been very careful so far, though.”

“It’s been a while. At least a year.”

Quistis glanced at Rinoa. “A very useful year.”

They swept past the ring road and into the tangle of streets within. Their car instantly slowed to a crawl. Galbadian flags warred at the roadsides with banners screaming support for the separatist regions, for the Shenand Hills, for Timber, for Nanchucket Island: bearers of both stood in the waning light, mere feet from each other, bullheaded bulldogs ready for a fight. As a dozen police officers advanced on the flashpoint, set to break apart the protesters, a path opened in the traffic, and their car launched forwards, leaving the shouting behind.

They turned rightwards and into the city’s central square, filled with more people, clustered here so that they could say in later years they’d been a part of proceedings. Was Irvine hiding in that crowd? The Presidential Palace stood at the square’s edge, unyielding, unchanging. Behind it, a mere backstreet’s width away, stood the offices of the main ministries – defence, foreign affairs, judicial affairs – and the Viper Building, the Army’s Deling City office.

The Army was the key. Any viable election candidate would have to convince the Galbadian Army not to stage an immediate coup.

Rinoa frowned at the car ceiling. She could stop a coup as soon as it started. Ultimecia, were she here, would explain a way for a sorceress to stop a coup before it started.

That wasn’t the point. For the first time in years, Timber wasn’t the point. ‘Galbadians’ registered as citizens of Timber were not entitled to vote. She wasn’t stupid: she had always known that she would have to convince _Galbadia_’s citizenry that she had something to offer it – but for the first time, she began to doubt her approach.

*

Presidential hustings had last been held in Galbadia over twenty years ago. Presidential hustings were a very big deal. TV stations, aerial and cable, and fifty news and comment reporters thronged the entrance of the Presidential Palace, blocking the view of the five hundred or so Deling City residents who’d come to watch the red carpet.

Quistis led the Balamb Garden party – herself, the five uniformed SeeDs assigned as personal security for election candidates, and Rinoa – from their car along the gauntlet of spectators towards the Palace gates. In all the years she’d had close scrutiny, as SeeD prodigy, as tutor, as war hero, as Headmistress, she _despised _it. The sooner she could retire to the background to her ostensible overseeing position, the better.

Rinoa shone in crowds. She’d gone for a simple evening dress in gold shot with flame-red, dancing-length (because running away from fire, flood or furious assassin in a full-length dress was just plain awkward), and was smiling from side to side as if all the eyes on her were nothing at all. Zell, on her arm, grinned at her and cracked jokes under his breath till both of them were frankly giggling, heads together – they were the same height with Rinoa wearing heels – like a pair of children.

Why, oh, why, could Quistis never assume their air of relaxation?

Perhaps because all the past scrutiny had, _for so long_, led up only to criticism of her mistakes. Her adoptive parents had required perfect deportment, perfect grades, perfect performance in sports and games. Her Garden tutors had picked up on the simplest mistakes – well, mistakes in Garden courses got one killed, or got one’s squad killed, and _that _was a little more serious than incorrect tense declension in Ancient Centran – and the only way to keep them quiet, to keep their attention off her and on her hotter-headed classmates, had been perfect scores.

For half a moment, as cameras flashed in the evening air and TV anchors recorded pieces to camera, her mind dwelt on her Garden classmates. Xu’s test scores had always been second only to Quistis’s: they’d been friendly rivals, then friends, until now, when they worked together so closely and so efficiently. They’d been a trio back then, for their friend Arianne had usually been third in the class. She had died on her second active mission. Quistis often tried to remind herself of Arianne’s exact hair colour, or the way she’d laughed, or the vitality she brought to any occasion. As the years stretched on, though, the number of dead classmates grew, till only ten or so of her final class remained in Garden.

Seifer Almasy had been her classmate for several years, one who drew the tutors’ ire upon himself as easily as he riled Quistis. Arrogant, bullying, the centre of attention (whether positive or negative) in _any_ environment… there’d never been a real chance of him making the grade in any military role. It had been three years since Garden had last had a report on his whereabouts. Presumably the Galbadian Army, without a forgiving sorceress on site, had been an environment where his inability to toe even the most minimal line had not been tolerated.

The Presidential Palace interior, visible through open doors, was a riot of light and noise. Quistis steeled herself for the sensory assault and led the Balamb Garden party past doorkeepers and guardsmen and a major-domo and a favoured pair of journalists (both from Deling City-based operations), through the vestibule, into the entrance hall, and through what felt like a Behemoth’s maw into the Palace ballroom.

Bunting in the form of five hundred tiny Galbadian flags draped the curtain rails and picture rails. A lectern covered in gold cloth, raised on a temporary stage, formed the hustings platform, beside a small string orchestra sawing away at a few classical standards. Galbadian citizens in black tie thronged the room, in knots and small groups: farmers who wore their finery awkwardly, aristocratic farmers who wore their finery as if they mucked stalls in it, financiers sipping whisky while sending poisonous glances at the farming aristocrats, socialites waving to each other over glasses of champagne (and, Quistis noted, quite a lot of them waving to Rinoa); a thousand citizens of the upper and middle classes, those invited and those who had invited themselves. Among them moved Army officers, the junior and the extremely senior. Quistis spotted three of the four generals who had accompanied Interim President Hahn to the summit with Esthar. General Markham of Intelligence was, as far as she could see, absent.

“Headmistress Trepe!” Quistis turned and came face to face with a young Galbadian lieutenant: a woman, unusually for the G-Army. Enthusiasm flickered from her aura-like, as Selphie’s might should she ever decide to contain it. “It’s a great pleasure to welcome you to Deling City.”

“It’s a pleasure to be here.” Quistis held out her right hand. The newcomer pumped it.

“I never thought I’d see you on assignment. Hypatia Greenway, Galbadian Army Signals Corps.”

“Delighted to meet you.” Signals Corps, or SIGINT?

“You know, you’ve been the most amazing inspiration for me. Your _career_ has been such an inspiration.”

“Has it?” This was becoming the kind of conversation during which Quistis had to clench her teeth.

“SeeD in general, but you in particular. The sight of women in visible leadership roles in a military environment is so important for Galbadian women. I really hope you appreciate that.”

“I do. I’m aware it’s not easy.” OK, preferable to some similar conversations.

“I guess when you’re trained to it,” Lieutenant Greenaway said in wistful tones, “you can take it for granted. Never being told to get behind the boys.”

An advantage of her upbringing, perhaps, but… “Most of Garden’s SeeDs are war orphans. We take the responsibility of creating a new generation of war orphans. It’s a moral dilemma that always haunts us.”

Greenaway pulled the confused face of a woman who’d skipped her advanced ethics classes. Maybe, of all the Galbadian Army training academies, only Galbadia Garden set advanced ethics classes. “I accept that, but –”

“And she had to butt heads with me all the way through training. It’s a sore trial.”

Familiar voice, familiar look-at-me note in the tone. Quistis turned and frowned upwards. Of all the hundred and one possible complications –

“Seifer Almasy. How pleasant to see you here.” Her tone made clear that it was anything but.

Seifer smiled down at her, a golden sun in Galbadian Army dress uniform. Could a walk scream arrogance? The tilt of his head towards her? “The pleasure’s all mine. Thought you’d stopped following me about by now –”

“Please, spare us all the self-aggrandisement.”

Forget all her assumptions about his inability to transition to regular army. He wore a senior officer’s insignia, and, below it, the badge of the Army Intelligence corps.

Assumptions were very, very dangerous.

Greenaway, blinking at the exchange, saluted Seifer. “Good evening, Colonel.”

“Good evening, Lieutenant. Thanks for looking after Miss Trepe for me.” Seifer whisked her clear of the young lieutenant before either she or Quistis could protest. “I’m as surprised to see you as Greenaway was,” he said once he had put a group of chattering socialites between them and her. “Thought they’d never let you out of Garden again.”

“I get day release from time to time.” Besides, if anything urgent ever needed double signoff, she and Xu knew each other’s passwords and could forge each other’s signatures.

“You’re looking good.” His green eyes, hard and cutting, scanned her face. “Authority suits you.”

“And you always had to be in power.”

His smile was feral. “What a good thing I skipped all the tedious jobs, eh?”

“Army Intelligence isn’t a career with lengthy prospects, _Colonel_ Almasy.”

The music changed to a livelier cadence. An empty space began to clear in the ballroom’s centre. First a stuffy middle-aged couple, then a few younger and more dashing pairs, then Rinoa and Zell, formed into dance sets. “We live longer than SeeDs, on average,” Seifer answered. “Is that a thing now? I thought she and Leonhart still shacked up together.” He pointed to Zell and Rinoa, laughing together as they waltzed.

“He’s her bodyguard. He’s staying beside her.”

“So touching.”

She should have resisted the pressure on her hand, but, instead, let him lead her onto the dance floor’s edge and into hold. “If he’s the bodyguard,” he said in her ear, “who are you?”

She sent him a level stare. “You’re the intelligence officer. Find out yourself.”

“I’m finding out; I’m asking you.”

Quistis snorted at his right shoulder. “SeeD has been hired to ensure that none of the candidates assassinate each other. I am assigned to observe proceedings.”

“Ooh, the fair play award.”

“Esthar wanted it. The Galbadian Army chiefs of staff agreed to it.”

“Ah, but they may not have realised you were actually going to do it.”

She turned in his arm’s circle. “You could have told them…”

“That SeeD always gets the job done? Yes, I did. General Markham may even have believed me.”

Fantastic. Whichever faction might want to try to assassinate Rinoa – or, to be fair, any candidate – Seifer would be feeding them inside information on how to counteract SeeD’s tactics.

In particular, he could predict her own likely battlefield actions far too well. She needed to withdraw herself from the mission.

Except, of course, that she couldn’t, because only five SeeDs in the whole of Garden knew which contract was actually being fulfilled.

“You,” Seifer mused a few inches above her, “look like you’re about to freeze your toes off. That means you’re worried. Dilemmas are so much fun, aren’t they?” He laughed a light laugh towards her ear, as if he were trying to amuse her. “I’m so glad I’ve enriched your evening.”

More like her month, or the rest of her year. “Your work here is clearly done.”

The music drew to a close. Seifer half-bowed over her hand. “It looks to me as if I haven’t started yet.”

“My lords, ladies and gentlemen,” a Palace official in a fantastic wig announced from the foot of the stage, “pray silence for General Caraway.”

Caraway mounted the stage and nodded to all four corners of the ballroom. His speech was short and to the point. Galbadia was moving into an exciting new future. Friendship with Esthar was coming; progress was coming. With a new dawn would come a new leadership mandate. To that end, candidates for the presidency of Galbadia would present themselves here, now, to the great and good, and to the populace as a whole. In four and a half weeks, the public would decide on their leader. He briefly mentioned the official Shumi observers, Administrator, Returner and Manager, and the SeeD delegation. Eyes landed on Quistis. She smiled them away.

General Caraway vacated the podium, and Interim President Hahn replaced him. Hahn was clearly still smarting from the demand to have a _contested_ election, as opposed to the coronation he’d expected, and his speech was resentful, full of appeals to the centre of Galbadian society to unite behind him, Galbadia’s natural leader, its expected leader, the son of their beloved president who had unified the country. He ended his diatribe by casting aspersions on anyone who would dare stand against him. The socialites giggled.

Well, they _would_, now. As Lieutenant Greenaway had said, women in Galbadian society were expected to take second place. But in an election, their vote counted exactly the same as that of their brothers and husbands and fathers. They suddenly had power. Their needs and desires suddenly had to be taken into account.

Caraway recaptured podium and microphone. “I now call upon those of my fellow Galbadian citizens with support of at least a hundred of their brethren to present themselves as election candidates.”

Rinoa detached herself from Zell, kissed a beautiful young woman at her side – clearly an old friend – and mounted the stage with a wide smile, a wave for the crowd and a dismissive shoo of her spare hand for her father. White wings, half here and half not-here, trailed from her shoulders. A few of those present drew back in something like shock, and others, beginning with the knot of financiers, hissed their displeasure. One financier muttered something to his fellow, who called out, not quietly, “No more sorceresses!”

Rinoa laughed, sending the financier her most limpid smile. “Galbadia achieved its greatest peak of military and cultural power in recent centuries with a sorceress in charge. Across the ocean, a sorceress dragged Esthar to modernity and greatness. Why can’t Galbadia take advantage once more?”

She launched into a speech not quite the one she’d rehearsed, more heartfelt, with fewer long words: still an appeal to the youth of Galbadia to seek change and growth. A new Galbadia, a Galbadia for all of its citizens… words to worry those senior financiers for whom the old Galbadia worked very well, thank you. Words that fired up the younger element in the crowd, and, from the sounds of cheering audible through the great doors, those waiting outside, far more have-nots than haves.

Rinoa exited the stage to excited applause. Before Caraway, whose cheeks had, over the past five minutes, run the gamut of colours from bright red to pale, could invite further members of the crowd to declare their candidacy, a woman in early middle age – at least ten years older than Hahn, who was himself five years older than Rinoa – jogged up the stage steps. She wore a red trouser suit, as severely tailored as SeeD uniform, and her glossy brown hair was brushed back into an updo less elaborate than many present. A good number of the financiers immediately applauded.

“Dear friends and enemies.” Half the crowd laughed. “Continuity has a benefit. Change has a benefit. With this election, we will tear down the walls of Galbadia as we knew it. That’s inevitable. What we must seek to preserve is the soul of who we are.

“For those of you who do not know me, my name is Arcadia Deling…”

Quistis caught Rinoa’s eye. _‘Niece’_, the younger woman mouthed. Niece of Vinzer Deling, she meant. Niece of Galbadia’s twenty-year dictator.

Arcadia Deling launched into a roundly patriotic speech, blessing Galbadia’s strengths – its military, its economy, its agriculture – while making appeal to a greatness past and yet to come. She referenced enemies without and within (which enemies without? Esthar, the prospective friend?), and added a few lines about “Galbadian blood protecting Galbadian soil” that made Rinoa’s social smile, visible from Quistis’s position, crack. She tied up her speech to more applause from the moneyed interests in the room and, again audible within, to cheers from those outside.

Two figures near the stage briefly conferred with each other, and shook their heads. The first, a besuited financier, mounted the stage and captured the podium. “I, Markus Meacher, withdraw my prospective candidacy for the presidency. I urge my hundred friends to support, with all their hearts, Arcadia Deling.” The second figure – one Fidelius Parvant, an Army major from his uniform, and Quistis would have to find out who Markus Meacher was – made an identical speech. A third prospective candidate with eyes on the way the wind already blew, a woman a little older than Quistis in the starched collars of an experienced parliamentary under-secretary, made a similar short speech in which she urged her friends to support Rinoa.

Caraway brought proceedings to a close. At least three hundred of Deling’s finest youths immediately mobbed Rinoa. Quistis motioned to Marina and Elian, two of her four spare SeeDs, to introduce themselves to Hahn and Deling: they melted into the crowd. Meanwhile the remaining pair, Aliss and Devi, were deep in conversation with Parvant, the Galbadian officer who had withdrawn his candidacy, and another junior officer wearing Engineering Regiment badges.

“A pretty spectacle, eh?”

Quistis started. She’d forgotten about Seifer. She sidestepped till he was out of her personal space. “That’s none of my business, nor yours.”

“It becomes both of our business. Work to do.” He saluted her and retreated.

Quistis took a deep breath. Her hands were shaking. Her first rendezvous with Irvine couldn’t come soon enough. Too bad she couldn’t send a direct message to Selphie –

Or maybe she could. Yes. She could.

*


	5. Summon Up The Blood

The Dingo Desert was chilly before sunrise, cold winds blowing across the dunes and puffing sand into the air. Under a tan-brown tarpaulin, itself more than half covered by sand, Selphie was warm. She moved aside the tin medicine box that had kept her shelter doorway clear overnight, propped herself up on her elbows and raised binoculars to her eyes.

A few miles away over rolling dunes, the Galbadian Army Research Department’s roof tiles glinted silver, catching the first dawn-light. As the sun rose, the GARD huts rose with it, groaning out of the desert sand. Selphie slipped a sachet of Magic Chicabo coffee gel from her pocket, and sucked it dry still watching the base. Moving buildings were a cool sight, sure enough, but she’d seen it before – the D-District Prison used a similar trick.

The base slowed to a stop. A minute passed, then two. Then a door gaped open – a huge door, a garage door half the width of the Garden quad – and four tanks rolled out, bigger than standard Galbadian Ramuhs, and with wider calibre guns.

They were ugly beasts, heavy and dark, but a tank’s purpose wasn’t to be pretty. (Nobody had ever said that to that Esthari tank designers.) They made good progress across the sand, rolling well without digging in. Their trail took them near Selphie’s position, and past her until they were half a mile from the GARD base.

There they halted and formed a loose line. Their turrets rotated. With a _whoosh _and a rumble, missiles flared skyward, towards the distant firing range targets.

A second set of missiles followed, and then a salvo that sounded and moved like AP incendiaries. Next came frag rounds, before the tanks rumbled back into motion, and began firing again while on the move. The gunnery officers must be having a party, with all the gil they were exploding right now.

An hour or so later, with the sun still on its way up the sky, the four tanks withdrew towards the half-hidden GARD facility. Once they were inside, the base sank back into the sand. Selphie squirrelled herself inside her shelter and pulled the medicine box back into position. She couldn’t do anything more for an hour or two: GARD staff would be viewing the firing range. Best she took a nap.

Time slid on and on. Time ought to be a bit more grateful to her: it still existed, thanks to her and her friends, didn’t it? The sun’s heat beat down on her shelter, and she sipped from her water canteen. Still a little time to go.

Midday in a desert was the magic hour, when sky and land merged into one and water seemed a memory. Midday in a desert was near-silent, where not even a fastitocalon slinked amidst the dunes and no birds flew, when the air had just the sound of wind on sand for company. You had to be pretty daft to venture out at midday in a desert.

As her SeeD-issue watch ticked over to midday, Selphie stuffed her medicine box into her kit bag, wormed out of her shelter on her belly, pulled her bag out after her and slid down into a dune valley. Only the discarded tarpaulin showed she had ever been there at all. With plenty of hummocks between her and the GARD huts, she marched down the valley towards the firing range proper. She was dressed like one of the nomads indigenous to the desert; hair and mouth wrapped in a long cloth to keep out the sand, and loose clothes covering her arms and legs. Sunny day, what a joy…

A warning sign in red text, written in standard Galbadian and copied into Dingite rune-script, met her a mile or so down the valley. She nodded at it and wandered on. When she rounded the next dune, the firing range came into view, and she lifted her binoculars again.

The targets had been eviscerated.

Shrapnel rain dug into the desert floor amid patches of glass burnt out of the sand by the incendiaries. Selphie frowned at the wreckage. She’d seen tank artillery this effective before, sure, and fired it with its officers’ blessing. In Esthar. Used against Lunar Cry monsters. Galbadia didn’t have any wildlife that nasty anywhere in its territory, other than on the Island Closest to Hell, which was unoccupied by humans for good reason.

Looked like Hummingbird was right on the money.

She backed away down the valley until she had passed the firing range warning sign, and cut away north-eastwards, with her back to the GARD base. It was a long hike to the desert edge and the clefts in the cliffs where her little yellow motorbike was parked, and she was still more used to taiga and tundra hiking than desert. Best she get on with it.

*

Selphie drove into Deling City as the sun rose the next morning, singing inside her helmet, with her desert clothes abandoned multiple miles behind her. _“You are my sunshine,” _she carolled, _“and my starlight shines for youuuuu...”_

It was much too nice a morning to spend all of it indoors. She parked a few streets from her rental apartment, took off her helmet and crossed the road into a riverside park.

She strolled across parkland lawn, past spring bulbs’ riot and birds’ scattered feathers, and into the trees. As she walked she slid a packet of Mogster’s Marvellous strawberry bubble gum from her pocket, pulled the last strip from it and began to chew. She gave the now-empty packet a pensive glance, and, without breaking stride, shoved it into a cleft in a hollow tree used by sundry Deling City residents for a similar purpose.

Selphie blew a bubble, and popped. Birdsong here, deep within the city, rippling through the park, sounded like innocence. She danced a few quick steps as she wandered towards the park gate.

Near the east gate was a cafe, its red-striped awnings currently closed, with overnight drizzle’s last puddles dripping from fabric to concourse. Some late-night reveller on a sugar binge had dropped a half-eaten bag of Golden Saucers – Galbadian pre-packaged doughnuts, coated in cinnamon and sugar – on a windowsill near the café’s back door. Selphie eeped in delight and scooped them up.

Inside, underneath a Golden Saucer that had been nibbled by a bird, was a tiny plastic chocobo, a little free toy found in every tenth packet or so. Selphie gave a tiny cheer, retrieved the sugar-sifted chocobo, dropped the packet back on the windowsill and headed out of the park with the chocobo in her pocket.

She let herself into her parkview apartment, flopped down on the sofa, retrieved her laptop from her backpack and checked her email. Official message from Quistis, copied to Garden Administration, ordering her, assuming she had completed her reconnaissance of the snowfields near the Shumi Village, to withdraw to Trabia Garden and start writing a report on the Second Sorceress War for the two new cadets. Selphie frowned at the screen. _What _did she need? Trabia Garden meant Deling City, and the ‘two new cadets’ meant the election candidates – only two: good news for her – but nothing about the war had been in Squall’s list of possible instructions. She pulled the plastic chocobo out of her pocket.

Its belly, formed of two ovals, cracked open for her easily. Inside was a tiny slip of paper, with Irvine’s handwriting on it.

_Work on BH and AD but also SA._

SA, when Quistis had referenced the war: had Seifer resurfaced?

*


	6. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

A silver spoon tinkled round and round in General Caraway’s teacup. Quistis, settled in an armchair with a good view of the General’s study door and window, sipped her own tea and listened to the city outside; car engines and distant voices, squawking rock doves and meowing cats. A busy city, Vinzer Deling had renamed for himself: a wealthy city, and one that clung to its own privilege.

The mere concept of election had loosed a tiger here. Over the past week, she had sensed its claws sharpening.

“I’m a little out of my depth,” Caraway confessed, setting his teaspoon in his saucer.

“You were a young man the last time this country held elections. You have the advantage of remembering.”

Remembering more than a media circus and a frantic scrabble for position. _Would a president have real power?_ the media asked in every possible reiteration. Would a president be able to command the army generals to stay out of civilian life? There was no legislature in Galbadia, and had been none since Deling had abolished its parliament (on grounds that he gave all citizens exactly what they needed and wanted). Would a new president reinstate the parliament? The questions went on and on, with the inevitable answer of – no one knew. No one apart, possibly, from the army chiefs of staff, and they wouldn’t discuss the topic.

Caraway waved her comment away. “I have the disadvantage of not being forced to imagine the impossible. No. My challenge is to comprehend what each candidate would offer the army.”

Maybe that was the answer Quistis had needed. She let a chill settle into her voice. “Hahn seems incompetent enough to leave you alone to control military matters.” Irvine had given her Selphie’s first mission report. The new tanks were real. That level of ballistic advancement spoke of substantial control by Army top brass over the defence budget.

Caraway snorted. “He’s a known quantity: he offers that. Deling has her name as a standard, and she talks well enough of the pride and honour of serving one’s country.”

“Ah, yes. Easy words from one with no prospect of ever seeing a battlefield, and from one who would like to ensure that arms manufacturers see more of the defence budget than the soldiery will.” Quistis lifted her teacup to her lips again. “Rinoa has seen plenty of battlefields.” Enough to wish for an end to them.

“Rinoa.” Caraway grimaced at his cup. “Rinoa puzzles me. She staggers me. Not her desire, nor her intent, but her capacity.”

And now they came to it. “I cannot understand her capacity any more than you can.”

He raised his head to meet her eyes. Confusion clouded his expression. “You _fought alongside_ her. That gives you some basis for comparison. I take part in a battle with any man – any machine – I come to understand it a little more.”

Quistis shook her head. “A man or a machine has limits. I’m not certain that a sorceress does.”

General Caraway rose from his soft chair and walked to the window, stirring his tea again. A sign of nerves, it seemed. “You have met the president of Esthar, yes?” he said over his shoulder.

“I have.” She’d got drunk with the president of Esthar, or had been the designated non-drinker.

“I haven’t. Esthar is so far ahead of us in technological terms – but our soldiers use paramagic. With a sorceress as our president, could our soldiers access more magic through her?”

Quistis set aside her teacup and joined Caraway at the window. The General’s formal gardens lay beyond, an idyll within the city, framed by goldening leaves.

“What you ask for is a Guardian Force for the army. A sorceress is not a Guardian Force. Her powers come from within, and do not spread without, except on occasion to a single individual, her knight.” Quistis sighed. Honestly, Caraway should have asked Seifer about this one. With the exception of Rinoa herself, he was the local sorceress expert. “Your rank-and-file soldiers have _Fire_ spells, I’m aware.”

“Yes. We find control of magics difficult to teach our recruits. A basic fire spell is the most they can master.”

“And your officers study some support magic. Curative, protective.”

He nodded. “We want something more powerful. Spells we could hoard to counter the Esthari army whether or not they shared useful research with us. One of these Guardian Force things –” He broke off with a sigh. “How does one obtain them?”

She shouldn’t laugh. “Defeat them in combat, or entice them from an opponent’s possession. As your soldiers draw spells from each other in training and resupply, one can draw a Guardian Force. Alone, though, a Guardian will not be enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“How many men and women make up the Galbadian army, General?”

“Six hundred thousand men. Under a thousand women. Our recruitment policies are a little backward.” He laughed deprecatingly.

“And how prepared are you to give lessons on ethical use of magic to that many soldiers?”

Stupefaction passed across his face. “This is a tool. One uses it, as one uses any weapon. Our men receive training on ethical use of weapons.”

“A SeeD cadet receives a minimum of twenty hours’ instruction specifically on ethical use of magic prior to taking their written exam. Not combat ethics – ethical use of magic.”

“That seems wildly unnecessary.”

“Really?” She raised her eyebrows. “You capture an enemy spy on the verge of death. He dies on the way to a field hospital. Do you cast _Life_ on him just for the sake of the information he holds? Or do you do so with the intention of actually letting him live afterwards?

“A soldier’s joint is damaged by shrapnel. You can _Curaga_ him instantly, but the joint will never be usable again if you do. Alternatively you can leave him in pain until he reaches medical attention, and he will know that you could have stopped his pain, but did not. That’s a lesson every SeeD has to learn, from the inside and out.

“When fighting a dragon I would have no compunctions against drenching it with _Water_, followed by _Thunder_ magic. To do the same to a human would be unethical. I’ve read reports – doubtless fabricated,” and she gave him her most headmistressy stare, “of Galbadian soldiers cremating civilians with _Fire _magic while still alive. That would be _highly _unethical. There are endless other examples. For instance…” She took his teaspoon from his unresisting grasp, and dug a fingernail into her skin. Concentrate…

Paramagic was easy. Seize the power that had been squirrelled within, and direct. Blue Magic was about mindset, shaping of desire, dragging the energies so carefully studied and selected into the world and –

And the magenta flares converged on General Caraway’s teaspoon, and it disintegrated.

Caraway staggered backwards as if he had been shot, staring at the pile of silver shavings on the carpet. “That is…”

“_That_ is a particular type of magic difficult to use and harder to master. I will not use that spell on humans. I will use it on monsters, and humans’ equipment, but never on a human. Do you understand?”

He nodded, a marionette on a stage. “Yes. Yes, I understand.”

*

Zell mimed a left-handed punch towards Rinoa’s face. She raised her right forearm to vertical, blocked and thrust his arm out to the side. “That unbalances you, so I can…” She threw a left-handed punch to land just in front of his face.

“If I’m not expecting your counter, it does.” Zell made a theatrical sideways stagger, and rolled onto the blue-green gym mats on the floor and stood up in one fluid move. “What else?”

“Start again.” He threw the same punch at her. She stepped backwards, neatly, tidily, knees bent and weight balanced. His forward momentum took him stumbling to her left. She mimed another strike at his head.

He straightened up. “Good. Now, let’s try the neck grab again.” He came in behind her, a bare centimetre from her, and locked his right forearm round her throat.

Though she knew he was going to do it, though he’d done it many times before, the pressure on her windpipe caused instant panic. Every instinct screamed at her to grab the arm, grab the elbow, and push outwards. Rinoa threw her head down and to the left, towards his right hand, and grabbed his fingers and shoved the hand away at an angle.

“Good one. Carry through the motion.” She kicked back at the side of his left knee – gently: she couldn’t bear to hurt him by accident – and jumped clear, preparation to run.

“You’re getting better at this.” He pointed her towards the benches at the side of the gymnasium, by the windows. “Two minutes.” She nodded, and flung herself down on the bench and retrieved her water bottle.

Maybe she’d never need any of these techniques, but the training kept her fit and kept her mind where it needed to be. She leant her head back against the windowsill. Aeroplane engines roared past overhead. A military aircraft. Earlier, in the recording studio, preparing her latest broadcast, it had sounded like half a squadron of military aircraft was flying past: the repeated noise had ruined take after take after take, and all she’d been able to do was laugh it off, for if she’d cursed the Air Arm, her reaction would have got into the papers.

Zell swallowed a bare mouthful of water and sank down into a thigh stretch on the mats. “Just a tickle,” he said before she could ask. “It’s nothing serious.”

“You’re my flexible friend.”

He grinned up at her, but the smile faded. “What’re you trying not to think about?”

“Too many things.” She closed her eyes. “There’s that stage, whenever one’s just started something major, when all of the potential negatives hit at once. I just have to ignore them. Pretending to kick your legs out from under you is a good distraction.”

Zell stood up, bowed towards the centre of the mats and backed off them to Rinoa’s side. “I always reckoned on counting the positives instead of blanking the negatives. You’re turning a dictatorship into a democracy here.”

“Democracy’s the worst form of government apart from all the others humans have tried. I just… am having major doubts.”

“_Why_? Why now?”

“Because of the others.”

“Come on, Rin. You never thought this would go without opposition.”

“Of course not. I just assumed…” She pushed herself upright and stared at the clouds outside, and at the poster of her own face on the bus stop nearby. “I assumed the army would try to stamp down on me. Hahn is weak: the army could take over his government at any time. They’d want to keep him in favour of anyone else.”

“Hence the bait.”

She nodded. “Exactly. But Arcadia…” She trailed off.

“She’s a nothing. Right?”

“A nothing with a voice.” Rinoa gestured out of the gym windows at cars rumbling past outside, at passers-by hunched into their coats, at Deling City and a hundred thousand angry voices. “Hahn is a pompous young prick too fond of his silver spoon. Arcadia Deling frightens me. Her supporters frighten me. They’re too intense.”

Zell slung a sweaty arm round her shoulders. “You’re intense, because you care. It means a hell of a lot.”

“It means a lot to Timber, and to every other region that Galbadia holds by force. But to a Deling City manual worker, or a financier, the election won’t change their world… except that they define their identity by being superior to those in the regions. Some of them – they seem so angry at the _prospective _loss of that superiority. Did you hear Arcadia yesterday? ‘The Galbadian Plains have supported the provinces for too long. Time for them to start paying for their own protection.’ She shouts slogans about barring people from occupied provinces from moving to Galbadia proper, and crowds cheer her.” She shivered. “Vinzer Deling was fond of saying that Galbadia would never have mob rule. I can see Arcadia raising a mob into a riot. I really can.”

*


	7. The Monarch Of The Glen

On the evening Squall found the Stag’s note, he went straight to bed, slept for three hours and, as the clock ticked between eleven and eleven-thirty, left the inn and staked out the large oak tree at the east of the village. He saw nothing, from then until cock-crow.

During the morning, he called a local mechanic to tow his car to her garage and replace all four of its tyres and its crank shaft. If the mechanic noticed that all four tyres had been punctured by the same thickness of knife, she said nothing, but she explained that though the tyres could be refitted there and then, the crank shaft would take a day or two to replace. Squall, nursing bruised toes onto which he’d dropped the sledgehammer, indicated that he wouldn’t mind the wait.

“Did you hear?” the inn’s landlady, Berry, said that evening as she served supper. “The West Obel Bridge. It’s gone, with an Army tank rolling across it. A dozen drowned.”

“Did it collapse under the weight?”

“No, no. The Forest Stag...”

That night he saw a shadow under the tree, but it was gone before he could approach.

An anti-tank mine or four, on the major road between Obel Village and Deer’s Crossing, exploded the next morning, prompting nearby Galbadian Army units to move further to the north-west in search of a culprit (the Forest Wildcats, allegedly). The inn landlord Nenu grunted an opinion that the Wildcats were wild fools and any local driver could have triggered the mines. Squall nodded agreement.

In the afternoon, a truck full of farmhands from a nearby Galbadian-owned vineyard drove into East Oak. Squall, idling by the village cenotaph – a habit he’d had for a few years, scanning for any surname shared with a SeeD – watched them draw up in front of the inn. Five men, sturdy and tall, and boiling with aggression. Squall slid round the inn’s rear, through the kitchen door – Berry, inside baking pies, gave him a sharp stare but said nothing – and into the taproom via the side door.

The quintet hadn’t broken any glasses, yet. A couple of villagers, elderly men who came in for a glass of gin and a game of Triple Triad each afternoon, stared up at them from their corner. The landlord, behind the bar, watched them approach with some care.

“Nice pub you got,” the man in the lead said.

“Thank you,” Nenu answered. “What can I get you?”

“How about the licence?” the man grunted. “This village ain’t going to be here much longer; may as well put out and get out.”

“Or a gallon of whisky,” a second man answered. “Nice and, I dunno, flammable.”

“That’s enough,” Squall said, commander voice, and he slid out of the shadows and put his shoulder between the farmhands and the bar.

“You Galbadian?” one of the farmhands said with a suspicious stare.

“My father was Galbadian Army. My mother was from Winhill.”

“Half-and-half,” the farmhand snorted. “Only half counts.”

“Get _out_,” another muttered towards Squall’s ear. Instead, he leant on the bar counter left-elbowed, his right arm dangling at his side, as if ready to grasp a gunblade that was currently taped to the inside of his car boot.

The farmhands’ leader looked, for half a second, as if he were going to rush him, and Squall tensed his left shoulder ready to grab for a makeshift weapon, any makeshift weapon. Maybe his lack of facial reaction gave the other man pause, for he hissed naked anger to the ground and, with a call of, “Come on, then!” to his fellows, stomped out of the taproom. The truck trundled out of the village minutes later. Nenu passed Squall a whisky without asking.

That evening, Squall did not go to bed, but walked out to the eastern oak tree as the light was fading. This time he took the Stag’s note from his inside pocket and, with the tree’s bole between him and the village, ripped it to tiny shreds, unreadable.

Sundown in a forest happened in pieces, fragmented by foliage. Night felt as if it had just begun, here, under a tree that had been here for anywhere up to seven hundred years and could last a few hundred more. As the oak’s crown blackened, losing the last glimmer of light reflected from lower altitudes, Squall began to walk back towards the village and the inn.

He had gone half a dozen yards before he realised he was not alone.

He turned. A figure sat below the old oak tree, a shadow-outline, a trick of the twilight. Only the eyes were visible as glimmers in the darkness.

“You’re good,” the figure said, unfolding. Light tenor voice: slender build. “You made very few rustles, that first night, and fewer last night.”

“I didn’t see you the first night.”

“I know.” The dark figure moved closer, and they walked in step away from the tree, and away from the village, deeper into shadow. Owls hooted from tree to tree, _“kewick, hoo-hoooo,”_ a courting couple or nested pair. Nocturnal rodents scratched their paths among leaf-litter. The air was thick with the scent of autumn, of damp, decaying leaves.

“I don’t think the Forest Stag collapsed that bridge,” Squall said into the night.

“Don’t you?”

Blowing up bridges, when an occupying army had mobile bridges to bring in, was a temporary solution at best and aggravating to one’s own populace all the time. “Too careless of other life. Every other act I’ve heard attributed to the Forest Stag ran no risk of harming a civilian.”

“You forget one example. The Forest Stag once located a Galbadian Army black site.”

Squall hadn’t heard that story. ‘Black site’: such a hollow euphemism for an unauthorised jail. “That must have taken some work. The Foxes have looked for those for years.”

A laugh ghosted to him. “A fox gang is too noisy. Well, the Stag succeeded. Just once, though there may be a hundred such sites across the occupied nations. There was an explosion. The Stag has been more careful since.”

“We assume, in this, that the Forest Stag exists.”

“Shadows exist.”

“A shadow is an absence, not a presence.”

“And a SeeD should be planted in a garden, not uprooted to wander alone.”

Squall smiled faintly. “I didn’t want to implicate anyone else.”

“In what?”

Instead of answering, Squall said, “What do the people of Timber want? An end to Galbadian oppression? Formal separation as an independent nation? Both? But if only one were available, which would they choose? I’ve been coming here off and on for three years. I still don’t know which opinion is the majority. I keep getting different answers.”

“I see. You feel insurgency cannot overcome invasion.”

“It can. History bleeds with examples. The key for the insurgents is always affecting public opinion in the invading nation. That public pays for the invasion and will continue to fund it only as long as it thinks it benefits.”

They walked along in silence for a few more minutes. At last the shadow said, “The Forest Eagles took the fight to Galbadian soil. They were all executed, every man and woman. So were their children.”

“I don’t suggest you bomb Deling City.”

The shadow half-laughed. “No, not with Rinoa Heartilly a few heartbeats from power. She’s naïve, but determined.”

An accurate summary. “And if R – Heartilly does take power? Timber will fracture, into conflict and more conflict. There must be a figurehead.”

“The Forest Stag is not what you seek.”

“Why? Because the Forest Stag is more than one person?”

“Because the Forest Stag is valuable in the shadows. A whisper and a rumour, a ghost grown larger than a person. Once proven human, the mystery vanishes.”

Moonlight illuminated a fallen tree ahead. Squall perched on its stump. “Ghosts and mysteries don’t win wars. Logistics wins wars, and loses them. The Forest Foxes believe me on that. Not sure who else does, but the Foxes do. Deny the enemy their supply lines. That seems to be the Stag’s goal as well.”

The stranger halted in shadow. “Galbadia brings its supply lines closer to Timber with every acre of land turned over to farming. The land that once supported our people has been usurped.”

“Timber could benefit in future from the infrastructure. Take that airbase, for instance. It would make a fine civilian airstation.”

The shadow laughed. “The Galbadians would destroy it rather than leave it for Timber.”

“Not if they could be persuaded to abandon it, thinking that they would return. Much as, I recall, they can be induced to abandon trucks filled with provisions and ammunition.”

Silence answered him. He turned. The Forest Stag, if this were the Stag, had gone.

*

Squall left East Oak Bend the next morning and spent the next two days up a succession of trees within binocular sight of the Galbadian Army Flight Corps airbase. By the end of the second day he had a working plan of the security towers and usual patrol routes taken around the airbase perimeter.

He descended his final tree at three in the morning, the hour when night shift watchmen grew dopey and began to dream of food and beds, and hiked to his car through the forest. He reached it at dawn, still with its curtain of branches on top of bonnet and roof, and, with some care (for he had parked barely eight miles from the airbase), began to ease off the coverings.

A piece of white paper sat on the driver’s seat. Squall shoved aside the remaining branches, clicked open the door and grabbed the paper. A note.

_When Timber has its airstation, you will have your figurehead._

*


	8. Two Things Are Infinite

Interim President Brycen Hahn usually brought his three pugs to his morning ‘Meet The Press’ events. Selphie liked dogs, all kinds of dogs, but the dog’s characteristics always depended on the owner. Take Rinoa. She’d trained Angelo to a nicety: playful when a person wanted to play, but aloof from six-year-olds scared by big dogs or SeeD Commanders with armfuls of paperwork. Brycen Hahn’s pugs, in contrast, widdled on TV camera stands and nipped journalists’ ankles.

Selphie took another swig of her chilli cappuccino (from Margareta’s, the third-best coffee shop in Deling City; she reeeeeeally wanted to leave Rinoa first dibs on the best two) and decided that her alter ego, Steffi Tallis, was particularly fond of tiny, ill-trained dogs.

“How old are your darling pugs?” she breathed into her microphone. A couple of older press journalists alongside her eyerolled.

The interim President beamed. “This is Puce; she’s eight: Casper is six, and this is his sister Elzie – she’s five. Aren’t they the loveliest?” Puce squatted to relieve herself next to Selphie’s shoe.

“It’s so nice to see an important political figure reveal himself as a dog person.”

Later on, after scribbling five hundred words for the _Talking Point_ website about the correlation between competence in dog training and competence in political leadership, Selphie, on her third flavoured cappuccino of the day, this one the Choco Cherry special, opened the proxy client for the Galbadian government’s server. SeeD had known the server client address for several years, courtesy of a sacked diplomatic aide and a sympathetic Trabia Garden cadet.

Brycen Hahn’s email address was a matter of public record (whether he read any of his own emails, Selphie couldn’t venture an opinion), and, from that, his logon name for the network was too. Password…

Selphie tried _PuceCasperElzie_.

-_Logon failed. Reminder that passwords must be a minimum of eight characters long and contain the following: capital letter, lowercase letter, digit.-_

OK, given that Puce was eight years old…

_Puce_ plus the dog’s birth year got her straight into the network. Selphie saluted the sky and, with it, her late infiltration tutor. _‘The weakest point in any computer network is its users.’_

She forbore to open the email client – for the moment – and, instead, went straight for the file server. What do you know, the man was silly enough to have kept copies of the letters he sent to the Army’s procurement department demanding that they purchase all future ammunition and small arms from Point Up Inc.? Less than half a minute on the internet told her that Point Up Inc. was owned by Hahn Holdings, and it wasn’t a vast leap of the imagination to tell her _that_ company’s owner.

Selphie started to sing under her breath as she opened files, screenshotted, copied documents. Interim President Hahn’s salary payslips, saved to the server. Interim President Hahn’s expenses forms, saved to the server. Confirmation that Interim President Hahn employed three aides and a personal secretary in addition to those allocated by custom to his office, and confirmation of their salaries, saved to the server. Short note in which Interim President Hahn discussed his _two_ aides, saved to the server.

This was all so easy.

*

_INTERIM PRESIDENT HAHN’S FINANCES UNDER QUESTION_

_Sources for the Esthar City Journal with shock revelations that Interim President Hahn initiated related party transactions…_

*

_GALBADIAN INTERIM PRESIDENT IN NEW ETHICS PROBE_

_One of Interim President Hahn’s ‘aides’ revealed as pole dancer May Atricio. The Daily Blaster exclusively reveals the opulent surroundings…_

*

General Caraway had offered Rinoa the use of his house for the duration, after he learnt she began her presidential campaign from a hotel. She declined, but rented a smaller house nearby, in the hopes of indicating a certain friendliness between them while, simultaneously, asserting independence. Caraway promptly declared himself insulted, and the press pondered the extravagance of the location and who was paying for the rental. (Squall was, happily so, but the press hadn’t got that far yet.)

At least she didn’t have to put up with her father over the breakfast table: nor did she have to spend every spare second wondering which servant, out of all of those she’d relied on for years, was spying on her for him. In addition it was easier for Irvine to spend evenings and nights patrolling nearby rooftops for suspicious activity when a nearby house tenant knew he was meant to be there.

And she didn’t have to put up with Caraway’s opinion on her staff. She’d expected, and received, a mountain of offers from her Deling social circle to work with and for her campaign. Her chattiest friends she cheerfully employed to walk from house to house, in their accustomed districts, in ‘new money’ districts, in tenements in the city’s outskirts, away from Deling City to towns across the Great Plains, to ask what people wanted in a President and discuss what Rinoa could offer. Some of them were rather good at it. The rest were cheap advertising.

For her chief aide, she’d selected a girl who’d been a couple of years below her at school, keen to learn, balanced between shyness and eagerness. Tasmina was willing to do what Rinoa asked, far more so than one of her direct contemporaries would.

Their morning routine always began with websites, blogs and newspapers. The morning with exactly three weeks to go before the election began with a sweet surprise.

“Pole dancer?” Tasmina exclaimed to the _Daily_ _Blaster_ web page. Zell, who’d been watching the street beyond the window, burst out laughing and trotted over to read the exposé. Rinoa giggled into her takeout mocha. She’d been engrossed in the _Esthar City Journal_. The average elector might not have any idea what related party transactions, shell companies or expenses underrecording were. Just about all of them would know what a pole dancer was.

Arcadia Deling’s banker supporters would make solid use of the _Esthar City Journal _reporting, more so than she could. As for her…

“I may bring Angelo to my meet-and-greet at the preschool later. Toddlers and herding dogs look good together.” The herding dog in question, under her desk, licked her feet. Rinoa reached down for an ear scratch.

“The Central Deling Domestic Violence Refuge would love a photo op,” Tasmina pointed out. “They’ve been asking Arcadia for days.”

Photo ops with charities that vital still made her shiver. Charities shouldn’t need the publicity… but ‘should’ and ‘did’ were worlds apart. “It’ll be quite a shift from pole dancers.”

*


	9. The Witching Hour

Hahn’s office was quiet for the remainder of the day barring a statement that the Interim President’s private relationships were just that: private. Rinoa could not rest easy. Hahn’s demeanour throughout the campaign had been so petulant, so noisy, so close to the top of his skin, that she found it hard to believe that his advisers had caught control of him now.

She entered her office next morning to find a framed photo hanging on the wall of Angelo herding five or six delighted two-year-olds. “Thank you, Tasmina.”

Her aide looked up from the pile of morning papers and smiled. “The photographer sent it over specially.” She held up the _Galbadian Telegraph_: the photo graced its front page. In a side column lurked their chief finance correspondent’s Opinion on the _Esthar City Journal_ revelation about Hahn’s shady dealings.

Well, Selphie was keeping up with her side of things. Rinoa sat down and opened her laptop. A hundred new emails, most of which she could pass over to Tasmina to answer, most of which wanted her to attend conflicting events or provide them with insider soundbites: a direct message from Irvine, pointing her to a comment piece (not written by Selphie) praising her poise, freshness and lack of underhanded dealing. It was nice to be remembered.

“Rin,” Zell said from his window seat, “SeeD car incoming. Were you expecting Quisty?”

“No.” She looked up. “She’s not due for another three hours: she should be at Arcadia’s right now.” She edged her chair back from her desk.

Zell, ninety percent concealed from both her and the street by the voluminous curtain, hummed at the glass for a moment. “It’s OK. It’s Xu.”

Rinoa straightened. It wasn’t OK. What was she doing here? “This can’t be a social visit.”

Zell unhooked himself from the folds of heavy damask and retreated into the hall. Tasmina stared back and forward from the door to Rinoa. “Miss Heartilly…?”

Rinoa closed her laptop. “Xu is a friend of Zell’s, a fellow SeeD. The head of Administration at Balamb Garden, in fact.”

A bright smile spread over Tasmina’s face. “I’ll make tea.” She whisked away.

“Please find some shortbread too,” Rinoa called after her.

Zell ushered Xu into the office. “Think we finished the shortbread yesterday,” he said, closing the door.

“We did. Something’s the matter.” She gestured to Xu. “Of all the people I expected _not _to leave Garden…”

“…with Quistis and Squall both on assignment,” Xu finished. “You’re right.” She bowed to Rinoa. “This arrived last night from my most reliable source inside Galbadia.” She spread her paper-sheaf out on Rinoa’s desk.

ARMY’S 3RD ARMOURED DIVISION ADVANCING ON TIMBER ENVIRONS. PRESIDENT’S ORDERS TO MOVE AGAINST REBELS. THERE HAVE BEEN NO REBEL INCIDENTS TO WARRANT THIS LEVEL OF RESPONSE.

Accompanying the note was a map marked with coloured arrows, numbers, a few code letters.

_Squall_. Had the Army realised a SeeD was in Timber with the rebels, and informed the interim President? Rinoa snapped her eyes to Zell’s, saw similar fear reflected there.

No. They couldn’t know: Squall was far too good at his job to leave evidence. This was happening because she was known to have links to Timber separatists.

The Army was still heading straight towards Squall, as much as it was her other friends in the area.

She shook herself. Xu didn’t know where Squall was: he’d filed a fake mission plan that placed him poking around Centra for Guardian Forces. She couldn’t mention him. “This looks like a troop movement diagram. I can’t read the details…”

“I can,” Xu said. “It’s a large task force including enough main battle tanks to subdue Deling City, let alone Timber, plus two unidentified unit markers – presumably some new weaponry the same source warned me of a few weeks ago.”

Zell nodded confirmation. “It’s not like the rebels have tanks of their own. Or even a friendly sorceress on hand. Er – sorry, Rinoa. The Army could flatten what’s left of the forest with this lot.”

“When will they arrive?”

“This says, in about eight hours.”

The door opened. “I’ve put some more shortbread in the oven,” Tasmina announced. She glanced from Rinoa to Xu. “Is it bad news?”

News. That was what it was: news.

“I need a friendly journalist, quickly.” Rinoa grabbed her contacts list and made a great show of looking through it. Every single name on there spent time on a daily basis demanding exclusive interviews. “This one will do; Steffi Tallis, writing for the _Dollet Times _and _Old Centrarian_. Contact her and tell her I’ll do her exclusive, if she can get here in quarter of an hour.”

*

_GALBADIAN ARMY ADVANCES ON TIMBER_

_From your Old Centrarian correspondent in Deling City. Dozens of Galbadian battle tanks have been observed motoring towards Timber’s defenceless populace…_

*

_WHY NOW? WHY THERE?_

_From the Esthar City Journal’s chief foreign affairs commentator. Esthar’s friendship towards Galbadia gives the lie that this show of strength has any relevance to protection from external threat…_

*

The most difficult part, apart from pretending that her knight, lover and all-around rising sun was nowhere near these moving troops, had been pretending she’d never met Selphie. Rinoa had had drama lessons – she was a performer’s daughter, after all – but acting as if she didn’t know her closest female friend was a bit out of the ordinary. Zell had managed to get Xu out of the way for Selphie’s visit on pretext of watching his back during a meeting with Irvine.

He would now know the news: Quistis knew it, for she’d arrived for a prearranged meeting with Rinoa just as Selphie left. She’d given her fellow SeeD a disapproving stare but made no other reaction.

“It’s a military matter,” Quistis had said, fingers gripping her teacup. “It is nothing to do with politics. That’s what Hahn will say. He will deny all knowledge if the public is critical and will decry all rebels if the public approves. You can’t win.”

Selphie was in position to warn the whole world. That was a win. Wasn’t it?

Rinoa, escaping from Tasmina with a quick word about powdering her nose, locked herself into her bedroom, sank down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Edea had always been a little coy on the topic of the sorceress-knight bond, warning only of risks, primarily to the knight’s sense of self, were the sorceress to overuse it, and Rinoa herself had never figured out exactly how it worked: just that there was… _something… _in the back of her head, in about the same place in her mind as she’d once felt a junctioned Guardian, and when Squall took a blow in training or became particularly cross with an obstreperous cadet (or parent), Rinoa felt what he felt. Only when they were close together, though; not, for instance, when she was in Balamb and he in Esthar. She’d never risked pulling on the tenuous chain. They _lived together_, for Hyne’s sake: when they were apart, they had phones for long-distance communication. Most of the time. Just not when he was in a forest trying not to be found.

She closed her eyes.

Magic glistened, a pyre begging for her to light it. No. Not this time. Just think about the bond, the link; a pre-war phone cable buried beneath the earth. Her to him.

_Squall. You’re in danger._

Time slid aside. (Ultimecia would have approved. Ellone might have helped.) Nothing existed except her, and, somewhere far away, him.

_Squall. The Army. The Army is coming._

A cautious fist knocked on her door. “Rin?” Zell called through it. “You OK?”

No. “Yes. Just a second.” The world was tilted sideways, undulating under her. Rinoa knuckled her eyes, rolled off the bed and staggered to the door.

Zell double-took at the sight of her. “You are _not_ OK,” he muttered. “You look like one of those fuzzy cats. The ones with patchy tails.”

Rinoa ducked back into her bathroom, sighed at her reflection, sheet-white skin smeared with makeup and a few tears, and picked up face cream and flannel. “I’ll buy some waterproof mascara tomorrow.”

He slid up behind her and wrapped an arm around her waist. “I pray to Hyne you won’t need it.”

*

As the sun sank behind Deling City’s rooftops, Rinoa spread the evening papers over her desk; not just the two papers for which Selphie had supplied the Timber news, but others. Her latest ‘Meet The Press’ would start in less than half an hour. She had to be ready.

Three newspapers cheered the Army advance – all three supported Arcadia and her crush-the-regions attitude. A few gave no overt criticism or support of the military action: plainly spoken news, balanced commentary inside. Two openly criticised the timing of the activity (_‘given that a change in administration may happen soon and may affect orders to military units…’_). Not that Rinoa had expected any Galbadian newspaper to offer the opinion that Timber’s citizens were people too.

She pulled the papers into a neat pile. Start and end each day with a tidy desk to put one into a good frame of mind, her father always said. She had to be ready to walk out in front of a hostile audience. Sombre, perhaps, and serious, but not agitated. She couldn’t look agitated.

The Third Armoured Division would reach Timber proper in less than half an hour and would already be deep into its satellite villages and towns…

She could do no more about that, short of working out how to teleport and throwing herself in front of the tanks. Some chance. Ellone had more chance of working out how to teleport than she did. Time and space were intertwined.

Zell stuck his head round the doorframe. “Time to head.”

“Just a second.” She glanced at her reflection in the mirror over the ornamental fireplace – she hadn’t changed her dress since the morning interview with Selphie, but she didn’t have time now – and pulled a brush through her hair, tidied her lipstick and nodded to her own white face.

She gave Zell’s hand an extra squeeze on the doorstep, though. Let every single paparazzo in town photograph them together. That, she didn’t care about.

“Irvine dropped me a note a few minutes ago,” he murmured. Worry creased his cheeks. “They’ve arrived. Been spotted firing on villages. Someone sent a video to the _Old Centrarian_; can’t think why.” He squeezed her hand back. “He can’t have…?”

No, Squall would never have given the Galbadian Army a sign that SeeD was on site, but given the number of resistance factions he’d flitted through over the past couple of years, any of his contacts might, however inadvertently, give him away.

Or he could have absolutely nothing to do with it and the vast force size could be Brycen Hahn waving his willy about and Squall standing right in the way could be a total coincidence.

This evening’s event was at the Deling City Coliseum, where once her mother had gigged on stage with full symphony orchestra and a special-guest rock guitarist. Rinoa had approved Tasmina’s venue choice at the time it was made. Now, when she mounted the stage steps to the pair of easy chairs centred in the spotlight and gave the auditorium her usual friendly wave, her heart quavered. There were _so many people_ here – three rows of journalists, a row of police, SeeD, military and other security personnel, and, behind them, a packed house of those citizens who’d clicked on the FREE TICKET button quickly enough (getting in the room with a presidential candidate was, apparently, a hot night out, made more so by Rinoa failing to fleece the general public for viewing fees). At least Zell could give her moral support, from his spot hovering in the stage’s wings out of the light. She spied Quistis towards one end of the security row. At worst, Rinoa could always be sure of being able to give the audience a genuine smile by looking in Quistis’s direction first. She’d sent Irvine tickets for an entire box on the upper circle, where she wouldn’t be able to see him. Hopefully he wouldn’t doze off in there.

Salli Carpenter, a bulldog of a presenter from _Weekly Politics_ on GBC, rose from one of the easy chairs and shook Rinoa’s hand. Carpenter wouldn’t have been Rinoa’s first choice of interviewers this evening. Or her tenth. Or twentieth. It had seemed like a good idea at the time she made the booking: get an interviewer likely to give her a hard ride, give her the chance to speak her mind. Many things had seemed like a good idea at the time. The red stage curtain looked like blood. She should have asked for a blue one. All the papers and websites and TV programmes associated her with blue.

She was sick of blue.

“Miss Heartilly, welcome to the Coliseum.” Carpenter smiled a brilliant whitened smile. “I hope I look sufficiently like a lion.”

Rinoa dimpled a return smile. She didn’t think much of the comparison.

“You’ve had a busy few weeks,” Carpenter observed. “Appealing to so many sections of the electorate without putting off the others must be a difficult juggling act.”

“I just try to be myself.”

“With so many selves to be – general’s daughter, sorceress, revolutionary – I’m impressed you don’t mix them up.” A faint giggle rippled from the auditorium.

“Oh, they’re superimposed,” Rinoa answered with a broad smile.

“Congratulations. However, while you chum up with socialites and socialists, on the basis of your outspoken criticism of the Army, I doubt any soldier, any member of a military family, could support your candidacy.”

Rinoa laughed off the comment. “I’ve spent most of my life in contact with the military. So much spending, billions of taxpayers’ gil each year, and who benefits? Not our soldiers. They don’t have the basic equipment they need; I’ve heard them say so.” Admittedly she’d heard so while sneaking about on the opposite side. “Their pay lags behind inflation. Where is all this money going? Siphoned to private weapons manufacturers, who sell us white behemoths?” She gave what she hoped was a decisive nod. “There is no clarity in our current military budget, and every indication that it is being co-opted by business interests rather than being spent where it is needed. I intend to challenge that, to the benefit of Galbadia _and_ its army.”

Carpenter flushed a shade of puce that clashed _terribly_ with the stage curtain. She retrieved her water glass and sipped. Rinoa’s smile widened. She was just doing her job: both of them were just doing their job.

“Doubtless a sorceress has any number of options up her sleeve –” Rinoa, with a secretive smile to the audience, leant back a little and let her wide sleeves drape open, revealing her bare arms. The auditorium responded with a gentle laugh. Carpenter smiled her bulldog smile. “Galbadia remembers the last time a sorceress led its armies.”

Rinoa sniffed. “Presidents and political leaders have no place at the head of armies. Directing overall objectives is one matter, but battlefield leadership is best left to trained leaders – our officers.”

Carpenter leant forwards a hand’s breadth. “The soldiery may _want _a sorceress at the head of the army. The generals may want their president’s magic as a weapon. What would you do in that case?”

“The strongest weapons are used most infrequently. Weapons alone don’t win wars. Good organisation wins wars. The Army has many excellent tacticians and logisticians.” She shrugged. “Logistics seems dull to those keen to watch a war from outside, cheering at the sidelines while other people die. Soldiers know that logistics is their work’s foundation.” A point Squall could have made. He’d be proud of her.

“Miss Heartilly, it _almost_ sounds like you approve of the Army’s aims.”

Rinoa’s hands, in her lap, tightened on each other. Her shoulders itched, wings trying to respond to threat. “We can’t discuss the Galbadian Army’s current aims without dwelling on today’s shocking news from the Timber region.”

“Shocking, you say? A routine military manoeuvre.”

“Galbadia is party to the Centran Regulations outlining armed forces’ conduct during wartime. Article three, paragraph six: civilians’ property rights are to be respected.” That one had been breached for years on pretence that the forest belonged to the government. “Article two, paragraph four: firing military weapons on civilians who pose no threat to the armed forces concerned is not permitted. Minutes before I arrived here, I received notification of direct evidence of Army tanks firing on unarmed, fleeing people! How, by Hyne, can that be considered anything other than a breach of our internationally-agreed obligations? Esthar will never ratify that treaty, if Galbadia proves itself so untrustworthy.”

Carpenter laughed a brittle laugh. “Miss Heartilly, let us be sensible; there are no voters in Timber! What do its internal issues have to do with Galbadia proper?”

If she wanted to play _that _game, Rinoa had no intention of stopping her. “Is Timber part of Galbadia?” Salli Carpenter’s eyes goggled. “It’s a simple question,” Rinoa persisted. “Is Timber part of Galbadia? If it is _not_ part of Galbadia, why are Galbadian soldiers, our countrymen and women, putting themselves in danger there, with no external threat on offer? If Timber _is_ part of Galbadia, why are its citizens barred from voting in Galbadian presidential elections?

“I would remind you that for twenty years there were no voters in Deling City and its environs, any more than there were voters in Timber. Do events in Timber shadow those to take place in Deling City? Are these Army moves, driving people from their homes, destroying infrastructure, extra-judicial arrests, an echo of what the current administration plans for Deling City? If Timber is part of Galbadia, why would the current administration _not _plan to deploy the army on Deling City’s streets?” A buzz started behind the press corps, _within_ it, observers and staff and journalists all clustered together, and as Carpenter stared in blank shock at Rinoa, the buzz began to travel past the civilian watchers, outside onto the streets.

“You seem to have no more points to make.” Rinoa motioned away Carpenter and turned to the press corps. “A question!”

Max Iryan from the _Deling City Tribune_ launched himself forward to the pre-sited press microphone less than an arm’s length from his seat. He must have won some sort of wager with the rest of the press corps to secure such an advantageous position. “Miss Heartilly, do you intend to make a working visit to Timber?”

The buzzing was not just one of sound. It was one of _feeling_, of _sensation_, deep within her: her magic. “As and when my security advisers have had time to assess the situation. Next!”

Selphie, wearing her Steffi Tallis badge with the _Dollet Times_ logo clipped to it, won the next microphone race by dint of Speed junction. “Miss Heartilly, how do you interpret today’s actions as compared to the current administration’s stated goal of unifying Galbadia?”

“Unification under threat of force is no unification at all. It is doomed to failure.”

As she spoke, her magic twisted beneath her, towards Timber, into a gaping absence. Her core, her foundation, her _heart_ rocked.

_Squall –_

“Ladies, gentlemen and friends of the press,” she said, fighting for composure, “this is too serious an issue to be addressed by one election candidate only. I propose a joint press conference outside the City Hall, starting in thirty minutes’ time. My team will contact Brycen Hahn and Arcadia Deling immediately. Galbadia deserves answers. It will get them.” She rose and stumbled backstage past the red velvet curtain. Zell darted up to her from the wings and thrust his arm at her. She gripped it to avoid collapsing.

“Rin,” he whispered, “what’s wrong?” Answers froze in her throat.

Reconnect. Reconnect. She thrust out her flailing mind, seeking an anchor. A fixed point materialised: she grabbed it. Wrong flavour, confusion and a shadow; fire instead of ice, and far too close by at that. She thrust it aside. Nothing else. _Nothing._

Tasmina ran through the curtain, flailing a little with its folds. “Miss Heartilly, I’ll call the other candidates’ aides.”

“Do so. Contact City Hall administration too. We’ll need a podium, barriers, press seating – the whole lot.” The younger woman nodded and withdrew. Thank Hyne. Get her away. Get everyone who couldn’t understand out of the way.

Heels clicked on the stage, audible above the thundering chatter from the auditorium. The curtain whisked sideways again and Quistis ducked through it. She let it settle, and said, “Rinoa? You went paper-white. What’s happened?”

Her hands began to shake. He wasn’t there _he wasn’t there_

“Squall’s vanished.”

*


	10. The Woods Decay And Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: combat violence.

_You’re in danger._

Squall started, tiny jerk into his G-Army-issue seatbelt. The words came and went, whisper in his mind, from his foundation. The Forest Stag, in the Army truck’s driving seat, glanced at him for half a second before returning attention to the road.

_You’re in danger_.

“The Army is coming.”

The whisper spilt from his lips with no conscious direction. The Stag turned and stared at him behind a Galbadian Army helmet: Squall sat, silent, fighting for breath. Those had not been his words. They had been Rinoa’s.

A mile away, further down the airfield runway, a plane engine whined, westward towards the setting sun. Squall glanced towards the sound. The mission took priority. Finish the mission. Gain a shadow’s support, to match Rinoa’s prospective paper crown.

The Stag grunted, less than acknowledgement, and eased their truck into line with a dozen identical supplies trucks in the airbase warehousing. Squall nodded, and the pair of them descended, locked up and marched with gentle purpose towards the personnel office and, beyond, the closest army cars.

They’d spent all week working on the details: when was best to walk, or drive, into the airbase with purloined credentials, how their payloads were best delivered, which angle they should choose to re-enter with different credentials and a new load. The Stag had relieved the Army of trucks, licence plates, uniforms, almost everything they might need over the last few months, and ID passes were easily pilfered from the unwary. One full day of manoeuvring in and out, from sunup to sunset. They were so nearly done and clear.

_You’re in danger._

Squall glanced from side to side as he strode for the gate. The airbase activity was just as it had been during his scouting trips. The Army might be coming, but not via this airbase.

He and the Stag saluted the gate guards, and were waved through. The Stag, brandishing a clipboard with Logistics Corps logo front and centre, motioned Squall into the nearest official vehicle, and climbed into its driver’s seat.

He kept eyes on the soldiery and Air Arm staff as they drove at walking pace out of the base. Agitation could mean their payloads had been discovered – could mean that new orders, orders of an advance, had arrived –

“A new operation?”

Squall started and looked at the Stag. “I assume. There were no manoeuvres planned before I came out here.”

“Electioneering.” The Stag snorted. “What a pity there’ll be terrorists for them to hunt.”

They hadn’t and couldn’t have known of the Army advance. But the Army would have staged a manhunt in any event – one that would fall on unrelated Timber rebel groups…

The Stag accelerated away from the Army base. Squall, brooding on actions and reactions, realised a few minutes later that they were nearing the deserted spot where he had abandoned his car. The Stag slowed to a halt at the roadside. “We need to warn the villages. I’ll meet you north of East Oak in quarter of an hour.”

Squall scrambled from the Army car. By the time he’d finished pulling aside the loose brush covering his hire car’s flanks, the Stag had gone.

He drove back into East Oak Bend somewhere over the speed limit and skidded to a stop outside the pub. Its door stood open, warm light spilling from it into the street. Within, a bell rang, and the landlord Nenu called, “Time, gentlemen.”

Squall scrambled out of his car and ran inside without even shutting down the engine. Behind the bar, Nenu broke off his conversation with a grizzled regular and stared.

Too late Squall realised he was still wearing Galbadian military uniform. No wonder he’d given them a fright. He cleared his throat. “The Army’s coming. Everyone in the village needs to evacuate.”

Berry gasped from the kitchen doorway. “Thank Hyne,” she whispered through the hand over her mouth. “Thank Hyne you came back.” She stumbled back into the kitchen. Squall thought he heard her first speaking to and then scooping up Milais.

The elderly men in for their regular Triple Triad game stared at each other, then at Squall beside Nenu. He nodded. They rose and scurried out into the night.

_You’re in danger_, his mind whispered at him again. He rolled his eyes. Yes, Rinoa, message received. Nice to know she cared, though.

Nice to know she knew.

Hummingbird?

“What’s all this?” Nenu said with furrowed brows, gesturing to Squall’s uniform. “Playing forest games?”

“Something of the sort.”

He grunted, and reached under the bar, coming up not with a weapon but with a couple of dusty bottles. “Shenand Hills lay-down,” he explained. “Sixty years old. My granddad brought ‘em back from an old war. They used sherry casks back in them days; makes the whisky all the sweeter.” He slung the pair of five-thousand-gil bottles into a leather satchel, and followed his wife into the kitchen.

Squall backed out to his car. Lights were beginning to bloom across the village, amid door-knockings and frantic motion; preparations to flee, north-east towards Dollet, south-west towards Timber, heading for refugee camps.

He turned his car and headed out north-westwards, not at his earlier speed but with caution. A mile or so outside East Oak Bend, bumping along amid potholes, a shower of twigs landed on his windscreen and slid off. He slowed to walking pace. A figure slid out of the trees, and the Forest Stag climbed into the front seat beside him.

“I warned the folk up around Cattle Cross and Rushy Stream. They told me the Martens and the Wildcats are out to play.” The news seemed to displease the Stag. “I’d expect the Ospreys too. Any advance from Galbadia proper will come through their territory.”

Squall accelerated. “Where do we go?”

“Keep to this bearing for now. I’ll navigate. What we do depends on when and where they cross the Obel.”

“Would they split forces?”

The Stag hummed a noncommittal response. “Oldbridge has been taken over by the Army. That’s their likeliest point. Take the right fork here.”

Squall obeyed, considering the local map imprinted on his memory. “Oldbridge is a hundred miles north-west. They couldn’t move on Timber with any speed if they crossed there.”

“I know.” The Stag sighed. “The New Obel Bridge just outside Clairton. Only thirty miles from Timber, only twenty from the airfield. Most of the land north of it has been logged.”

“Direct me.”

Less than half an hour later the Stag ordered a halt a mile from the New Obel Bridge. Squall drove his car deep into underbrush, and they padded off-road northwards.

The darkness was an enveloping blanket, moonlight filtering through leaves their only light. Straining to see set all of Squall’s remaining senses on high alert. He could feel the Stag’s body heat from a few feet away and could hear nocturnal animals rustling in the undergrowth. The Stag led the way, beckoning Squall onwards or cautioning him to halt predominantly by touch. As they neared the bridge, the Stag crouched and moved at a near-crawl. A tiny mechanical growling echoed ahead.

The tree cover thinned. Squall halted in the last line of covers. The Stag raised a pair of binoculars, then passed them silently to Squall. He peered.

A Ramuh tank rumbled across the New Obel Bridge, followed by a second and third: the Galbadian Army’s workhorse, powerful and reliable. The mechanical grunting in the background sounded like an auxiliary APC force, faster by nature than the main battle tanks, and less heavily armoured. Squall half-shook his head. He wasn’t equipped for anti-tank warfare.

That heavier growling, though…

The bridge creaked. Onto it edged a shadow wider than a Ramuh, and heavier. The bridge parapet squealed outwards in its path. Its turrets’ revolutions, pendulous and menacing, seemed ready to level trees and habitations together, or to wipe out fragmentary resistance before it could take hold.

Squall moved his lips up to the Stag’s ear. “Prototype,” he breathed. A nod answered him. The Stag squeezed his arm and gently tugged backwards.

They retreated together into the undergrowth, and on until they came up in a clearing. “Follow,” the Stag said. Squall nodded, and the Stag took off at a jog into the forest.

Squall was lost within half a minute, mired in sylvan night with autumn’s thinning canopy still blocking most of the moonglow. The Stag kept up a pace that Garden’s training officers would have admired. Twice Squall stumbled on tree roots and deadfall, and had to sprint to catch up. This was not his choice of ground for any fight.

Another twist, another turn in the game track on the forest floor, and Squall stumbled into a larger clearing. Moonlight glinted off glass and metal trim. Galbadian Army trucks, with ivy growing up the wheels; stolen half a year ago or more.

“Here.”

He edged round the closest truck towards the sound. Its rear door was open. The Stag was perched on the tailgate delving into a sturdy chest.

“Look what a little bird brought me.” The Stag gestured to a crumpled copy of _Timber Maniacs _next to the chest. Squall unfolded it. It was dated that afternoon and its print was blurry. “They used the emergency heatset press,” the Stag added. “Its dryer needs overhauling.”

_GALBADIAN ARMY ADVANCES_, read the headline.

Squall set down the paper. “How did this get here?” The Stag gestured deeper into the truck without answering.

“_Coo-coo_,” the darkness cawed. Despite himself, Squall felt a smile spread across his face. A little bird, indeed.

“Can you fire an anti-tank missile launcher?” the Stag enquired.

“Yes –” The Stag slung an ammo holder over Squall’s left shoulder and deposited a launcher in his arms. He examined its controls in the moonglow. The firing mechanism was slightly different from the Dolletian and Esthari brands he was used to, but familiar enough.

The Stag scrambled back to ground level toting a weaponry bundle, and led Squall back into the trees in a different direction. From the moon’s position, they were circling back towards the road’s southern contours.

After ten or fifteen minutes the Stag slowed. “They’re still north of us. We split up here. You go north, parallel with the road. I will trail you to the south.” Fingers squeezed Squall’s upper arm. “Do not step into the road for any reason, even to escape.” Before Squall could ask, the Stag slipped away into the forest.

Squall drew in a breath. The air was clean here, cleaner than on the Great Plains, or in the Timber environs cleared for farming. Nocturnal rustles angled away from the road, away from the advance. Deep behind him, embedded in the trees, something larger moved: heavy crackling, made by a man-sized creature. Could be a deer. Could be a Grendel. Could be a soldier. Could be an insurgent.

He edged forwards till he was certain that the dull glint between the trees was road rather than river, and followed it back northwards. After a few minutes, distant rumbles resolved into tank engines. The Galbadians had been slowed by the narrow bridge, but were on the move now.

He scouted north towards the increasingly loud rumbling until he found a suitable fallen tree. Hidden behind its bulk, he settled and watched. And watched. And watched.

A million thoughts queued up in his head, jostling for attention. The advancing company would soon, far too soon, learn that it had a welcoming committee. It had seemed sensible, years ago, to come to Timber alone, to win friends in person. He had intended to avoid all conflict with the Galbadian Army even when the Galbadians instigated one. Now? If only he’d brought someone with him from the outset. Selphie would have been a good choice. He would have had backup. She would have insisted they invent a fake client in the area so they could report their actual location to Garden. She would probably have put together the dossier herself.

Five minutes, less than that, and he couldn’t keep his mind clear. Irvine sometimes had to stay on alert in position for twenty-four hours or more watching for a target. How, by Hyne, was it possible? The man needed a pay rise.

The rumbling peaked. A pair of ARVs slid past his position. Behind came the tanks.

Miles away, lifetimes away at the airbase, came a _rumble-boom_, TNT’s song of triumph.

The soldiers’ radios started to crackle. Tank treads slowed; men signalled one to another. Maintain vector and continue mission.

Squall took aim. Moonlight shone on the new-model battle tank. Logistics won wars: how quickly could Galbadia produce more of the things, how reliable were they, how easy was it to train troops to use them? If Rinoa couldn’t take control in time – or if she failed – Timber would be unsalvageable.

He pulled the trigger. Recoil shuddered against his shoulder. The missile speared towards the tank with a diabolical hiss.

A tiny APS launcher on the tank’s upper turret spun round and blasted at Squall’s missile. Before its shot connected, Squall slammed a second missile home and fired again.

It should not have worked, but the proximity – way closer than sensible for use of anti-tank warheads, in terms of firing distance, in terms of time of shot – fooled the APS. It jerked backwards towards Squall’s second missile just too slowly. The tank juddered, and smoke spumed from its flanks.

The prototype was battered, but still fully functional. Squall took off at a run into the trees. Heavy cannon thundered to his left. A few trees disintegrated into matchsticks. Splinters showered his face.

Another hiss whistled from the trees, on the Galbadians’ far side, further down the road. The prototype’s APS caught the shot at once. Treads caught on the earth, shifted, shivered. Squall, struggling through scrub, listened. That must have been the Stag. The tanks were heading…

Heading away from him, towards the Stag. Squall relaxed for half a second before another high explosive round battered into the forest. The Galbadians had no intention of abandoning either presented target.

He changed trajectory and cut past another prickly thicket, along a path laid out by rabbits and widened by a larger creature. They’d have heat seekers out to look for him within minutes. He might be able to lead them to a Grendel den – that must be the Stag’s plan; there could be no other reason to lure the tanks down a wide open road –

_Rumble-boom_.

The ground rippled under Squall’s feet. He swung the missile launcher above his head and held it there against the flurry of falling twigs and branches.

He looked back towards the road. Searchlights and moonlight illuminated twisted gaps in the trees. Some were the tanks’ doing, while others…

The Stag had mined the road. No. The Stag wouldn’t have set a trap that someone innocent could have triggered. The Stag had lured the Galbadians into someone else’s mines.

Men leapt down from the tanks at the roadside, shouting one to the other in panic. From the far side of the trees, missile fire and gunfire rattled against vehicle armour. That _couldn’t_ be the Stag. The Wildcats? Squall kicked aside a branch blocking his escape route, lifted his missile launcher and fired into a gap in the trees.

He had a second missile in the air before the first landed – the first fell to APS fire, the second found a random target – and he fled for rapidly thinning cover before the second round’s echo had faded. His footfalls crunched into fallen twigs and leaves, hideously loud, but with the shudder and roar of tank fire, the soldiers could not have heard him.

Squall slowed and took his bearings. He had run closer to the New Obel Bridge than to the tanks stalled on the mined road. Best use of anti-tank missiles was to fire down on the target – upper armour was weakest. He eyed the nearest trees. How hard could it be to climb them?

Quite hard, it turned out, given he had missile launcher and ammo bag in hand. After a few minutes’ fruitless struggling he finally made it a couple of metres up in the air. Gunfire still rippled through the forest. He screwed his eyes shut for a few moments to restore his night vision.

Shiva stirred in his mind, pressing for release. _She _wouldn’t show up on any infra-red scopes the Galbadians carried, after all. Squall shook his head, shaking her off, and peered between the leaves.

More tanks and armoured recon vehicles were lumbering over the bridge. The morass near the mined road was on the move, slower than before. They’d trap the Stag at that rate.

Shiva tugged at him again. He thrust her back, locked his legs around the tree branch and called to Bahamut.

The silver-blue dragon leapt out of nothing into the sky, shrieking inarticulate vengeance. Missiles arced upwards from the Galbadian tanks towards his blood-dark wings. He spun out of reach of most of them and flicked one, contemptuous, downwards towards its originator. His maw opened wide, and plasma flared downwards. Shrieks of incinerating men cut into the forest night.

Bahamut rolled once more in the sky and faded back to the Guardians’ realm. Squall shook his head, shaking back reality, and checked the bridge again. Still with a Ramuh square on it. He raised his launcher, and fired.

His missile struck the Ramuh on its upper turrets. It juddered to a halt, smoking. Squall reloaded, aimed, fired again. The bridge supports at the Ramuh’s treads gave way. Tank, crew, and a couple of adjacent armoured reconnaissance vehicles crashed down into the Obel River’s fast-flowing depths.

Squall lowered the launcher. At last he heard no tanks moving; soldiers shouting, still the noise of gunfire, but no moving treads. He slid down to the ground.

With no pre-arranged rendezvous point, he began working his way southwards towards his abandoned car. At least, he hoped he was heading towards the car. Away from the Galbadians, to regroup, was a good start, but in the forest, in pitch darkness…

Twigs cracked, a few yards ahead. He froze. The Stag would never make that much noise –

“Halt!” called a military voice just in front of him. Squall flung his anti-tank missile launcher straight at the voice and drew Lion Heart.

Four soldiers’ outlines shimmered in the blue blade’s glow. Squall cut through to the closest man's chest, and followed through leftwards to the second’s belly. The third man was still staggered by the missile launcher. Squall switched direction, cut high to his right, and severed the soldier’s throat.

The fourth drew his own sword in time to parry. “Reinforcements to sector B12!” he shouted into a radio. Squall beat the man’s sword aside and lunged to his chest before he could say anything else.

Before the body hit the ground he raced off through the trees again. He’d got turned round, he knew, but it didn’t matter. Water rippled ahead, the Obel or one of its tributaries. He sprinted for the sound, vaulting scrub.

Abruptly the ground fell away in front of him. He slithered down a steep bank into calf-deep water. This would do. He splattered off upstream, away from the main river and towards his car and, far to the south, Timber. The stream’s racing song masked most splashes he made.

Where was the Stag? Dead or alive? Voices and noises deeper in the forest were the Galbadians. The stream gave him no visual cover, only aural. The soldiers were all on the east bank. He cut to the western bank –

A shout, ten yards behind him. _Ping-crack_, an AET round zinged off a rock just behind him, sending up half a dozen water spurts. Squall ducked lower, flung himself leftwards and sprinted for the far bank.

_Crack – crack –_

A dagger-deep burn exploded up his right ankle. He stumbled to his knees. Pain’s initial shock faded: something deeper and more nauseating gripped his leg in its place. Must keep moving, get away…

The shooting had stopped. Arms and legs soaking, limbs trembling, he pushed himself upwards.

“Got him.” The Forest Stag dropped out of a nearby tree and loped to the streambank, pausing on its edge. “How bad is it?”

The icy water was already starting to numb both of Squall’s feet. He perched on the largest nearby rock and cast _Scan_. Tiny visual effect: he could risk it.

Boot and flesh materialised out of the dark night and melted away. Bone lurked underneath, and throbbing nerves, and a mess of fragmentation. Damn it. _Damn _it.

“Part of the bullet’s in my ankle. The bones are shattered.”

The Stag leant closer to him. “Can you _Cure_ it?”

The pragmatic answer, yes, he could _Curaga_ the limb into a frozen, immobile club on which he could walk without pain but couldn’t run, probably couldn’t climb to escape. The answer that training had drummed into him; no, if he ever wanted to run on the ankle again – or fight with a gunblade, quicksilver-fast shifts from foot to foot – he must not do so.

“The damage is too bad; it needs to be set first.” Squall pushed himself upright. Another wave of pain quivered up his leg from ankle to crotch. Bearable. “I’ve kept moving with worse.” He’d killed Tiamat with one functioning leg and vision blurring from blood loss. Admittedly Zell had had to carry him back out of Ultimecia’s castle afterwards, but, still.

“Then we go.” The Stag splashed into the stream, presented one shoulder for Squall to lean on – Squall was several inches the taller of the pair – and hurried them both uphill, bleeding into the water, towards escape.

It was too much to hope for that the general advance would turn and search for a few insurgents. Then again, the warnings, in newsprint and telepathy, hadn’t said what the Army’s aim was. Pushing the whole population of Timber into the sea seemed over-zealous. They would halt their advance…

When they had spilt enough blood to justify the new MBTs’ development? When they had cleared not just land, but streets and city quartiers, for ethnic Galbadians’ exploitation?

Crackles and rumbles and the dull creak of a falling tree shuddered from the forest. The Galbadians were getting closer. Very close.

Squall squeezed the Stag's shoulder. “Split up,” he gasped. “You run. I’ll try to hide.”

“They’ll bring infra-red scopes.”

“Garden has many SeeDs. There’s only one Forest Stag.”

Dull laughter answered him. “The Forest Stag died months ago. There is no head for you to crown in Timber. You’ll have to find another figurehead.”

Dull cramping in his stomach echoed that in his leg. “Then who in hell am I leaning on now –”

The trees above them wavered.

“Go,” Squall hissed, and he shoved the Stag up the stream’s west bank. Wiry fingers yanked him, slithering on one foot and one knee, up into shrub. The Stag squeezed his hand. For a moment, pale eyes behind a helmet visor locked with his in the night, and then the slim form melted back into forest.

Squall blundered down a scrappy game track at a right angle to the Stag’s escape vector. Infantry support or ranged cannon fire could be on him in minutes. This was when he should activate his emergency distress beacon. It had seemed so important to maintain trust… and to provide no link to Rinoa’s sudden hankering for a new job.

Another aching wave ran up his leg. Keep going. He could salvage this. Find a hole to hide in – let Shiva drop his body temperature till he no longer showed up in infra-red; it was dangerous, but it would work – wait for the advance to pass, and get to his car. Fight the dizziness, the night, Galbadia, himself –

A crunch as a military troop opened a path in the trees. Barked orders. Squall hunkered down into underbrush. Fight the dizziness –

Something crackled into his back. Not a gunshot, but it knocked him to the dirt. The giddy feeling trebled. Lion Heart was slipping, slipping from his grip. _Fight –_

And another crack echoed next to his head, and he faded into darkness.

*


	11. The Strength Of Ten

Zell grabbed Rinoa’s hand. “Define ‘vanished’.”

Her answering grip was tight enough to whiten her knuckles and his. “Our bond cut out. It’s gone. He’s gone.”

Quistis’s stomach fell floorwards. She wrapped a hand into the thick red curtain to maintain her balance.

“He’s not dead,” Rinoa insisted, to her, to herself. “I would have felt that. He’s just – lost connection.”

“Anti-magic,” Quistis muttered. Rinoa raised her eyebrows and waved an imperious little hand. “Galbadian Army anti-magic force fields, like they use at the D-District Prison.”

“That was a _building_,” Zell said, glancing backwards and forwards between the two women. “He was – he’s in the field. Literally. In a forest, anyway.”

Rinoa turned away for a moment. Quistis took a few deep breaths, fighting for self-possession. Squall meant _everything _–

Garden was above personal concerns, above individual SeeDs. If Squall’s disappearance were material, his mission would be in jeopardy.

It would be equally jeopardised by her calling Garden for help.

“Zell.” He stared across at her. “Find Irvine. Now. Leave Deling City within an hour, and drive to Timber. Nobody else has his mission details, including Records – we can’t send any other backup. Xu and I will stay with Rinoa.”

It burnt – it hurt – she wanted and needed to take transport south. But her duty was to her client.

If Rinoa were wrong – if Squall…

He would want her to protect Rinoa.

Zell gave Rinoa a tight hug, saluted Quistis and slipped offstage via the wings. Quistis slid her phone from her uniform pocket and texted Xu a quick request to attend. Rinoa stared blankly at the flats for too many seconds, then shook herself all over as if she were Angelo, retrieved a compact from her clutch bag, and tidied her makeup.

“Press conference,” she said to a blank backing flat. “I can do this.”

“We need to wait for Xu.” Rinoa started – maybe she’d forgotten Quistis was even there – but nodded.

Quistis’s phone vibrated. AT THE STAGE DOOR, she read. She gestured Rinoa into the wings; Rinoa immediately turned right into a tiny dim-lit corridor away from the wider vomitorium.

“You’ve been backstage here before?”

“No, but I know where the stage door is from the outside – on Lettice Lane. It must be this way.”

Quistis cleared her throat. “I didn’t say we were going to the stage door, Rinoa.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Rinoa looked sheepish. “I didn’t read your mind. Honest. Not on purpose. You just… radiated stage-door-ness. I don’t know.”

“I’ll try to think more quietly.” The sarcasm went straight over Rinoa’s head, for she nodded with a grateful half-smile.

The corridor was dim-lit. Rinoa would know what the tiny lights were called. If Quistis thought about them hard enough, the sorceress might tell her. Quistis frowned into the shadows. Rinoa had never displayed power like that, quiet and profound and deeply troubling.

Had her fear for Squall led her to stretch her powers further than she had before? Did Squall’s presence in her mind usually preclude her from seeking out others? Quistis sighed. SeeD’s raison d’être was to combat sorceresses, and yet she, at SeeD’s pinnacle, let friendship prevent her from asking hard questions.

Now was no time to ask them. Not now, when it seemed like anything could unbalance Rinoa’s fragile calm, and not now, while she was throwing open the stage door and muttering swift excuses to Xu.

Because Xu still thought Rinoa’s fears for Timber had nothing to do with Squall.

She would have to tell Xu the truth. Not now, maybe not later tonight, but tomorrow at the latest. The three of them held Garden’s functions in equilibrium; were Squall’s absence to become _permanent _prolonged, they would have to rearrange.

Rinoa released Xu’s arm, and the three of them hurried down the back street deeper into Deling City. Rinoa directed Xu, who led the way with the air of a woman whose newest aim in life was to inhale a local street map. Crowds of citizens and orbiting police officers billowed down the main roads; these side streets were silent apart from a few drunks looking for a Winhill-style kebab shop, and the passers-by paid the three women no mind.

They slowed as they approached City Hall and its orbiting hubbub. Xu waved Quistis and Rinoa to stay where they were, and stalked, head up and medals glistening, down four alleyways in succession as if on an inspection mission until, grandly satisfied, she motioned for the others to join her.

Each side street bore two or four soldiers on guard: motionless grunts, with junior officers orbiting between them. Quistis eased Rinoa between such a pair and towards the security cordon. So close.

A journalist, tall man in his middle years, changed direction and beelined towards Rinoa. Xu cut him off partway, haranguing him in the middle of the street. Quistis yanked Rinoa past the security cordon and, as the younger woman collected her aides and approached the hastily constructed podium, paused a yard or so from a busy Galbadian officer and took a breath. She had to consider the ramifications –

“This wasn’t what President Hahn wanted.”

Lieutenant Greenaway from the hustings night. Quistis’s eyes shot sideways towards the young woman, whose attention was entirely on a memo, but she got herself under control before she could move her head. Staring straight at Rinoa, she murmured, “You mean the publicity? The journalists?”

“He prefers a _frontal_ approach.” Quistis frowned at Greenaway’s undertone. Squall had warned her before they parted for the missions never to be alone with Interim President Hahn, or to allow another female SeeD to be so: maiming one’s client was bad for business – “He wanted to embarrass the sorceress. Deling will be next.” She saluted a colleague on the far side of the columns and strode away.

Quistis made a slow three-sixty turn, watching the crowd. _Deling next_. Arcadia Deling’s welfare was SeeD’s responsibility as much as was Rinoa Heartilly’s. Deling, Deling. She’d read the woman’s official file. Daughter of Vinzer Deling’s late sister. Economics degree, MBA, a decade’s history working in financial services; no husband, wife or children.

Yes, Selphie had been looking for an angle to torpedo Arcadia Deling. It would be a tactical saving of resources to stand back and let Brycen Hahn do so first…

Outside the City Hall, riot police and soldiery motioned spectators back from hastily-constructed barriers. Journalists waving credentials to armed guards elbowed to the barriers’ front. The whole mass radiated tension. Perhaps Rinoa would read it – or perhaps Quistis should stop being quite so snippy. Rinoa did have a few things to worry about at present.

Senior military staff alighted from a series of black SUVs parked by the City Hall steps, generals and their aides-de-camp and assorted staff moving aside journalists and bureaucrats and civilian police officers alike. Fractionally less senior staff followed. Seifer was among them. For a moment he conferred with the others, heads and shoulder insignias glinting together, but he wheeled aside from the others, and strode to Quistis.

He jerked a hand towards the cluster of election candidates and SeeDs and publicity staff at the top of the City Hall steps. “You lost one?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Dincht. He’s gone. Thought he was Rin’s inescapable shadow.”

Damn. “Shadows who breathe, walk and talk occasionally need down time. Xu is more than capable at CQC.”

“Rinoa can immolate people. The bodyguard thing’s all a show.” He frowned across at Rinoa. Quistis stiffened. The two of them had been a couple, once; he knew her too well – maybe well enough to identify her distress…

The way he stared, though, the manner of his stance, was hyper-familiar. _Scan_ cast, and not the clumsy usage of paramagic by the unjunctioned.

He’d had no GFs since breaking out of Garden’s brig years ago, or so she’d assumed. “Where did you find a Guardian Force?”

He started and glanced down at her. A smile quirked his lips. “Time compression.”

She drifted to the left of the crowd, far from the reporters and, in particular, a long way from Selphie’s tiny sharp-elbowed figure. He followed her and perched on a bollard at her side. “I’d been – effectively, I’d junctioned to Ultimecia. Time compression tore all that up. Tore up another few things too. I ran into… _part _of a Guardian Force. He’d been separated from his squad.”

“Squad? The whole Guardian Force?” Minotaur and Sacred together comprised one GF; it wasn’t too surprising to learn of another such.

“Yep. A group of knights. This one figured that hanging out with me was better than being lost in time and space on his own.” He half-laughed. “Liked my sigil for some reason.”

“Knights. How on-brand.”

“You got it. He keeps trying to make me charge off to rescue damsels – and teacups, for reasons I can’t fathom.”

“Doesn’t it worry you to junction to a homesick Guardian who wants to put his sword in the wrong place?”

“Worry?” Seifer raised his eyebrows. “What _worries_ me is there’s eleven more of these guys out there somewhere. He mutters about his pals Cai and Bedwyr and Parsifal and their Weapon-killing antics and I pray to Hyne that none of them wander into anyone’s head round here. At least, not anyone who’s on the opposite side from me.” He smiled, golden dawn’s own demon. “What _worries_ you, Trepe?”

“Apart from S –” She changed the name on her lips at the last moment. “Seifer Almasy, you mean.”

“You shouldn’t let me get to you. You’re not my big sister anymore, nor my tactics instructor.”

“You were a terrible tactician,” she muttered. “Or pretended to be. You’ve improved.”

“Like whisky, with age.”

At the lectern, Interim President Hahn sputtered into a diatribe about ungrateful colonials and the sanctity of military force. Rinoa, behind him, wore a face of frozen fury. His cousin Arcadia’s smile was catlike.

Generals Caraway and Hyder mounted the steps towards the podium. Caraway murmured something in Hahn’s ear, then in Rinoa’s. Hyder bowed to the interim president and glared at him until he vacated the microphone.

“The Oak Range Airbase has been attacked by terrorists,” he announced. “The damage may or may not be significant enough to dull our military effectiveness in the area. There have been casualties; numbers are as yet unknown.” He glared at the journalists, especially the foreign contingent. “This incident demonstrates the absolute need for Galbadia to maintain a significant military presence in the area.”

Brycen Hahn nodded vigorously and motioned General Hyder back from the microphone. “This is terrorism. It is insurrection. Neither can be tolerated. Galbadia must protect itself. We must ensure Galbadia has a strong future.”

“Of _Galbadia_,” Rinoa said with venom. “Galbadia’s invasion of _Timber_ contravenes the agreements it signed up for under the Centran Regulations.”

“Over twenty years ago –”

“The Regulations were signed a hundred and twenty years ago. In force then, in force now.” Rinoa glared at him. “I reiterate a point I made earlier this evening in another forum. If Galbadia does not honour its existing obligations, Esthar will never treat us as an equal partner.”

Hahn’s face turned as puce as his dog. “You would flood Deling City and the north with unwashed criminals and their diseases and their incendiaries?”

“Willingly.” She half-laughed in his face. “Criminals, you say? We kill fathers, mothers, children, and we expect those left alone to… what? Stay silent and obedient? Is that even _possible_?

“We even deny them _internal refugee status_. We drive people from their homes and give them no refuge? Where do we expect them to go?” A chorus of ifs and buts rippled all at once from the press corps.

Arcadia Deling claimed the microphone. “Miss Heartilly is right.” Surprise flickered across Rinoa’s face, and she gave a little nod of thanks. “This action was underprepared-for and badly executed. One can assign no fault to the soldiers concerned. Doubtless they followed orders. The gentlemen who formulated those orders must have given thought to the people displaced or killed. They must have made arrangements. The necessity of such arrangements is obvious to any person of even moderate intelligence. We have yet to hear what those arrangements are. We have yet to hear that those arrangements have been transmitted in any form to those in Timber and its surroundings. In the absence of such communication, unrest must be expected.”

She glanced at Rinoa before continuing. “I diverge from Miss Heartilly’s opinion on two crucial matters. Galbadia’s territorial integrity is not open for discussion. Neither, in this forum, is Galbadia’s legislation regarding the movement of persons – particularly when those persons carry such risk to Deling City and its inhabitants. We cannot and will not harbour terrorists. To do so would be a crime in itself.”

“We’ve heard a lot about terrorism,” Rinoa retorted. “We’ve heard few specifics. Entering conflict with the Galbadian Army, hmm? Well, the Centran Convention determines treatment of enemy soldiers. The most recent Criminal Justice Act determines treatment of suspected violent criminals – explicitly including terror offences. Suspects are to face military or civil authorities – not to be executed without trial!

“Produce these alleged terrorists,” Rinoa continued over the hum. “Produce evidence. If crimes have been committed, present a _criminal case_. Driving thousands of innocent people into destitution is in no way a proportional response to terrorism.”

“These are unlawful combatants,” Arcadia countered. “They have abrogated their own rights.”

Shouting erupted behind the ring of journalists, echoed by chanting, further away. Behind the podium, the SeeDs on duty, Xu in their lead, pulled open the City Hall’s doorway and shoved the three candidates and the two closest generals inside. Marina, Arcadia’s bodyguard, and Aliss stood across the door with guns raised. Leviathan stirred in Quistis’s head. She stilled the Guardian with a shaft of reassurance she did not feel, and looked back.

The crowd listening to the press conference was retreating, some people with echoing squeals and tears, some shoving past their fellows for escape. Behind approached a fog of humanity, chanting words indistinct in content but distinctly menacing in tone. A handful of print journalists rose and fled as a pack: three TV journalists grabbed the closest film crews and began earnest pieces to camera.

Fire flared in the distance, illuminating faces, close-packed and furious, approaching. “Galbadia, Galbadia,” the city shrieked, followed by something about ‘death to race traitors’, and increasingly disgusting epithets. Were those fires improvised petrol bombs?

Quistis half-closed her eyes. Leviathan shimmied into the sky, sinuous and lustrous. Her maw gaped towards the recently-vacated paving outside the City Hall. Water sprayed to the flagstones, first a puddle and then a six-inch-deep flood, neither hurting nor halting the mob beyond but slowing them. One man, perhaps urged on by alcohol, flung his petrol bomb – a burning rag in a beer bottle – towards Leviathan. She flicked it to its death in the waters below.

_That_ gave the mob pause. As water lapped their feet, the Guardian’s pure conjuration now mingling with the effluent rising from overflowing drains, they halted, and the hatred in the air flickered.

Leviathan dived back into the Guardians’ realm. Before the mob could resume any race towards the City Hall, General Caraway captured the podium microphone. “Return peacefully to your homes,” he called. Police and troops at the perimeter fingered their weapons. Quistis touched the whip at her belt. _Let there be democratic, peaceful protest_ became _Let there be no bloodbath _–

Two more petrol bombs sailed to ignominious extinction in the water underfoot. In their afterburn, military uniforms glinted, at the mob’s edge…

In the mob’s service.

Seifer’s hand closed on Quistis’s shoulder. “Out, now,” he muttered in her ear. “This is going to get ugly.”

“Oh, will you stop –”

“I’m not trying to patronise you. _Balamb Headmistress Interrupts Civil War _isn’t a good headline. Let me and my colleagues get control of our fellows – and get those fucking journalists out of here.”

All the _I hate you_s could wait. Quistis beckoned to Aliss, still at the City Hall door. The younger SeeD dashed down to the remaining GBC camera crew and the pair of journalists expounding to them. Quistis herself made for the other group of cameras, a multinational group filming for _Horizon World_, Balamb’s _Ten PM News_, and the EBC. Foreigners sticking together.

The Balamb and Fisherman’s Horizon journalists ended their pieces as Quistis approached and started motioning their crews away to safety. Selphie, who’d swapped her _Dollet Times_ badge for an _Esthar City Journal_ one, did not pause in her speech to the Esthari camera. “A febrile atmosphere here in Deling speaks volumes for Galbadian engagement in the democratic process,” she effused. “Headmistress Trepe, as the spokesperson for the organisation in charge of election security, how would you characterise this evening’s protests?”

“I would _characterise them_ as a direct hazard to your well-being and would advise you to move further away.”

Selphie pouted as if Quistis were spoiling her game. “Where do you see this protest movement going, Headmistress?”

“It’s too early to say.” One day she’d learn not to prevaricate. Blood-and-soil protest as a rejection of personhood for the conquered of southern Galbadia –

It was too early to know whether the Army would crush further protest in Deling City, as it had for decades in Timber.

Exactly as Rinoa had predicted.

*


	12. Name, Rank and Number

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: graphic violence, torture.

The world was spinning. Dizziness rolled over him, seashore waves calling him home like flotsam, but the waves were flowing up his right leg, faster and hotter with every moment, till the dull burn became a pyre.

Squall cracked his eyes open. The concrete underneath him, against all sanity, was rocking, and the dull golden glare from the ceiling threatened to nauseate him. He screwed his eyelids back together and squeezed the floor with leaden fingertips.

Last time _Sleep_ had hit him this badly, he’d been a cadet. On more recent occasions he’d had a teammate to help wake him. No one could junction against everything, but he’d thought the Galbadian Army lacked _Sleep_.

The floor stopped moving. He tried opening his eyes again. That was better: the light no longer burnt so brightly. He half-sat, and stopped partway up as dagger-deep pain cracked up his right leg.

Same rules applied that he’d spouted to the Forest Stag. He must not cast _Curaga_ with an ankle bone shattered. Desperate times, and all that. He reached within –

Nothing. No magic, no Shiva or Bahamut, no Rinoa glimmering beyond. Just a faint buzz at the back of his brain.

Last time he’d felt that buzz, that _lack_ of all paramagic, had been in the D-District Prison.

Squall stared at floor, ceiling, walls. Concrete, a bare bulb overhead, steel bars for a door and window, a bucket in place of a toilet. A jail, but not the D-District.

He sat up, taking care not to move his right leg. Someone had taken off his G-Army breastplate and armoured trousers, leaving him in plain Army-issue shirt and long johns. Floodlights pierced the night sky beyond the window – which was set so low in the wall that he could see out even from a sitting position, across quiet fields to a stand of trees beyond. Probably somewhere near Timber. A few armoured cars were parked in the fields, alongside a couple of diggers marked with the G-Army logo. No glimmer of sunset or dawn gave him a reference for the time of night. He’d fallen at… ten in the evening? Closer to midnight?

Someone screamed. Squall jerked his head round and stared at the door’s bars. That had been nearby. Within the prison.

Another wail echoed down the corridor. This time it tailed off into a hoarse sobbing, overlaid by another cry, from someone else, further away.

Ice gripped Squall’s stomach. The Stag could be anywhere, including _here_. At least they’d warned the villages…

Steel clanged against steel, out in the corridor, and heavy boots crunched across concrete. “12-F can go back,” a distant voice ordered. Fuss and fumbling followed, a clink of a door lock close by, followed by a heavy thud and some ragged, tear-filled breaths.

“Which next?” a voice just outside said, over the sound of a locking door.

“11-D needs a prelim.”

A Galbadian soldier, blue-uniformed, peered through Squall’s cell door. “11-D’s awake,” he reported to the fussily secretarial voice further down the corridor.

“Go ahead.”

A second soldier came up beside the first. “You,” he ordered, “stand, and face the window.”

Much use it would be to protest that he couldn’t stand. Squall pulled himself upright using the window bars as leverage and, weight on his left leg, turned his back on the two men.

The door’s hinges squeaked as it opened. Military-issue boots stomped across the cell. Two pairs, matching the two voices.

_Now_.

Squall swayed rightwards as if unsteady on his bleeding foot, and, as he reached for the window bars again, whipped his left hand towards the closer soldier’s rifle.

_Kaboom_, ripping through the tiny space and half-deafening him. Hand grasping nothing, dizziness consuming him, Squall collapsed to his knees.

Hands gripped his elbows from behind and yanked his wrists together. _Click-clack_, handcuffs latching round his wrists. A huge soldier – one he hadn’t seen before, one who’d stayed outside the cell – lifted him upright by his collar. He was grinning in malignant glee. “Sarge said you was trouble, he did!” he chortled. “Gave me the sleep stuff.” He shook Squall midair, not hard. “Like a dolly, you are. All floppy. So’re Sheppy and Spike.” The other two soldiers were sprawled half-awake on the concrete floor, trying to rise.

_‘Sleep stuff’_. Canister grenade, that one there beside the soldiers, filled with Sleep Powder. Another recent Galbadian innovation?

The huge soldier set him on his feet. Pain rippled up his leg, nauseating him. “Start walking,” the fussy voice still out of sight ordered. His feet would not obey. Dizzy and dazzled, he staggered into the doorframe. The huge soldier yanked him out of the cell and, between him and a fourth man (_so many soldiers sent for just one prisoner; what do they already know?_), frogmarched him away.

_Keep watching_, training reminded him. _Watch the enemy, their personnel, their equipment, their positioning. Are they well-trained? Are they alert, or are they at ease, become lazy? All information is vital._

Outside his cell was a corridor lined, on the left, with identical such cells. To the right was a blank interior wall, with a couple of corridors leading off it. The soldiers dragged him down the closest corridor; the maze of walls continued. Nowhere could he see a door that led to the exterior, to escape. Passing Galbadians gave him barely a glance, busy with their own errands. Not lazy, but blinkered.

“In here,” the soldier at his right elbow ordered, and he opened a door marked ‘I-1’ and pushed Squall inside. Squall took quick stock of his surroundings. Not much to take in. Table, steel, military issue. Chairs, three of them, two at the table and one in a corner, military issue. Lightbulb hanging over the table. A door on the far wall.

“Sit,” the huge soldier barked, and pushed him to the closest chair. He sat. The dizzying _relief_ of taking weight off his right foot rushed up him.

Behind him, the soldiers hooked his cuffed arms round the chair back. The door opposite opened. An officer entered, resplendent in red uniform, followed by a smaller junior staffer. The junior sat in the corner chair and spread a clipboard and some blank papers over his lap: the officer took the seat opposite Squall’s, looking him over like he was a laboratory specimen.

“It took two sleep grenades to take you down, and now another to make you walk a few dozen yards,” he remarked. “You’re tough.” It sounded less than a compliment. “What’s so tough a man doing in the Timber woods?”

There weren’t that many woods left. “Just visiting.”

“Visiting some old friends?” The officer – a captain, by his uniform stripes – shook his head. “Or were you here to brush up on your gardening?”

The word _Garden _leapt out at him. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Polite knuckles rapped on the door the officer had used. Another soldier entered, saluted wordlessly and held out a shining hunk of adamantium.

It was Lion Heart.

“Thank you, corporal,” the captain said. “I’ll take that.” The corporal laid the gunblade on the table and departed. The captain raised his eyebrows. “Seen something you recognise?” Squall said nothing. His cuffed hands were trembling. Lift the blade, decapitate the captain and shoot the secretary in one move, turn and kill the two grunts. It would take three seconds. Except, of course, that his hands were fastened behind him and he could only stand on one leg.

_‘They teach you that name, rank and number bullshit,’ _Laguna had said to him once over a glass or three of whisky, _‘but on the ground, it’s all grat droppings. What happens… men chat. They cuss out their own XOs, the maps, the terrain, the equipment, till the enemy’s straight up sympathetic. Make them think you’re a moron, they won’t pay you much attention. You get handed over quicker that way, with their positions and materiel fresh in your mind. Come out with nothing but your name, rank and number, and they’ll know you think you’re special.’_

Well, Laguna was particularly good at making people think he was a moron, and Squall was as bad a conversationalist as he was a liar.

“Come on,” the captain said, an indulgent uncle. “Are you going to try to persuade me you _found_ that thing?” He indicated Lion Heart. “Or that those little glowing clouds, or that great grey dragon, were following you about by accident? Or that you thought you had a prayer of shooting your way out of here by grabbing a single gun?” He leant back in his chair. “Magic can mean Esthar. The gunblade could mean a military fetishist. The dragon… could just have been a dragon. Put all of them together and add an admirable death wish, they mean SeeD.” Another shriek, maybe from the next room, maybe from a hundred yards away, rattled the table.

Squall nodded, slowly, with caution. “I’m from Garden.”

The captain’s smile broadened. “Excellent. A VIP; I like that.” His silent secretary, in the gloom, made a note on his clipboard. “Your name?”

“Storm Raine.”

The pen over the clipboard scratched.

“Rank? Number?”

“Rank 25. ID 41269.” The combination of a fairly obvious alias and his actual ID number would be enough for any member of Garden hierarchy.

The captain nodded. “Who is your client?”

“I can’t answer that question.”

“How many other SeeDs are with you?”

“I can’t answer that question.”

The lightbulb overhead swam in a breeze. A moth butted against it.

“Which resistance group was your contact?”

“I can’t answer that question.”

The captain looked at him down his nose. “We have the Forest Stag in custody, you know. He couldn’t run forever.” Squall did not reply. He could be tolerably certain from that throwaway sentence that the Stag was _not _in custody. Tiny mercy. “The Martens are routed. The Wildcats’ leader is dead; her second-in-command is under arrest.” Blood after blood. It would never end: be Rinoa ever so powerful, she could not end it.

Not if they connected him to her –

Another scream cut through the wall. It was repeated. The captain frowned slightly. “Who supplied you with materiel in the field?”

“I can’t answer –”

A fist slammed into his right cheek. His head snapped sideways and the tiny room rocked.

A gloved hand gripped his hair and yanked him back upright. The captain came back into view, unmoving, expression unchanged. “Who supplied your military intelligence in advance of your deployment?”

Squall ran his tongue over his teeth. Blood was dripping into his mouth. “I can’t answer that qu –”

A heavy object – _gun barrel, with hate behind it – _cracked against his ribs. He doubled over, losing the air from his lungs. The gun struck his right shoulder. This time he felt himself falling, tried to throw out an arm to stop it, but instead landed hard, chair and all, on his left elbow.

The same gloved hand pulled him upright again. Squall blinked. The world swam, out of focus, shades of his earlier awakening. In the centre of the swirl, the captain sat, unmoving, unmoved.

“What is Garden’s strategic interest in Timber and southern Galbadia?” he said.

“I can’t –”

He expected the blow this time, but he couldn’t evade, couldn’t defend, could only brace against it. This time, when he fell, one of the soldiers kicked away the chair. He curled up to protect his stomach and groin. Someone kicked his upper chest, driving him out of curl. The back of the chair cracked against his kidneys, then his right knee. The blow rippled to his ankle. A squeal squeezed past his teeth.

A boot slammed down on his right ankle, and a second, and a third. Every nerve in his leg caught fire at once. The world shrank to a pinpoint. Someone was screaming, nearby. He realised in a last moment of awareness that it was himself.

*

Pale sunlight scraped up the wall, a dim reflection of life. Squall lifted his head, with some difficulty. His cheek had stuck to the floor.

Still alive. Not good.

He was no longer handcuffed, but he could barely move his left arm, and his right hand throbbed. He pushed himself partway upright. Nausea rolled up his throat. He collapsed against the window bars.

Dawn was breaking, in the trees. Something about the fields beyond had changed. The digger had moved: that was it. Fresh dark furrows marred the earth.

Rusted hinges squealed. From somewhere along the prison wall, to the right, men began to file into the field. They were all men, from what Squall could see, Galbadian soldiers and bloodied, stumbling prisoners, their hands bound behind them. Eight or ten prisoners, perhaps.

Three of the soldiers pushed the prisoners in a line towards the fresh furrow.

_No_ –

The trio stepped clear and saluted. The remaining soldiers raised their machine pistols. Gunfire spattered the air, an explosion of filth, of bloody tyranny. The prisoners folded up and fell into the trench in the field.

One of the soldiers glanced into the trench and nodded. The digger, a few yards away, roared into life and began scooping earth back into the shallow grave.

Squall slid down the wall and rested his head in his arms.

Some time later, a soldier entered, yanked his head up and poured water into his mouth. He spluttered and swallowed, not enough for a drink, just enough to lubricate his throat and tongue. The soldier grunted in something like satisfaction and left.

Distant screaming started up again shortly afterwards.

SeeDs rarely retained active service status past the age of twenty-five: death or disability called them home first. He’d hoped for a few more years. Not now, when no one, even Quistis and Rinoa, had the faintest idea where he was. The Stag might know… if the Stag had evaded capture.

He couldn’t put a life’s worth of faith in a shadow.

Footfalls ground on corridor concrete outside again. “11-D,” an indifferent voice grunted. Squall closed his eyes. 11-D was him. Remember the fake name. A name not coupled in the media with Rinoa Heartilly’s.

His cell door banged open. “Up, and face the window,” a voice ordered. Different guard this time. Properly wary of him, entering gun barrel first.

He did stand, barely. This time he could put no weight on his ankle without bone grinding against bone. The soldiers – two, again – cuffed his hands, in front of him this time, and muttered curses at him when he stumbled to his knees.

“What, you got no legs?” They grabbed his upper arms and dragged him upright again. Limping, each step agonising, he staggered from the cell.

Same prison corridor. Same passageway beyond. Utter lack of natural light beyond his own window, the window designed only to give a detainee nightmares. This time, though, the soldiers ignored door I-1 and opened an adjacent door marked ‘I-2’.

Larger space, with less light, less furniture, just a single corner chair. Another door opposite the one by which he had entered. Coils of… something, or several somethings, against a wall. A thick chain hanging from the ceiling, in the centre, directly over a small drain in the floor. The soldiers forced him to the chain and clipped his handcuffs to it. He stood, swaying. Eyes: stay forwards. Do not look to the sides, do not ask yourself what hangs there. Do not look.

The door opposite him opened. The same captain from the previous night entered, followed again by his secretary. The secretary had his clipboard under one arm and was carrying a steaming mug. “Good morning,” the captain greeted Squall. “Coffee?”

“Please.” It could be drugged. The water from earlier could have been drugged.

The worst they would get out of him would be his real name.

That would be a fairly sizeable ‘worst’.

The captain took the mug, drank a mouthful in apparent delight, and carried the mug to Squall. “Did you sleep well?” He lifted the mug to Squall’s lips.

It was awkward, drinking coffee from a mug held by a mailed fist, fighting the pointless urge to slam one’s hands into the cup and use its shards as a makeshift knife. It wouldn’t work. The captain already knew he was trying to get himself killed quickly.

Too soon the mug withdrew, and the captain set it down by the door. “We have a lot of points to discuss, Mr…”

“Raine. Storm Raine.”

“Ah, yes: I’d almost forgotten.” He glanced at his secretary’s notes, then gestured for the man to seat himself. “Who is your client?”

Squall licked the last drops of coffee from his bruised lips. “I can’t answer that question.”

The captain nodded to the soldiers standing behind Squall. One retreated towards the back wall. The thick chain began to rise into the air, dragging Squall’s wrists with it, till he stood balanced on his left foot’s tiptoes. Panic began to ripple up his belly. Don’t look.

The captain nodded in apparent satisfaction. “How many other SeeDs are with you?”

“I can’t answer that question.”

The captain’s indifferent eyes ran him up and down. “Strip off his clothes, Sergeant.”

Hands gripped his shoulders. A knife, G-Army issue, sliced from his shirt sleeves down to his collar and from waistband to trouser legs. Draughts licked his sides. Laughter, sniggering, echoed behind him. Figures moved in the periphery of his vision, touching implements.

The captain nodded to the figures at the outskirts. “Who is your client?”

Blackness, beyond, in the sky, in the future, in the new-turned earth outside. “I can’t answer that question.”

*


	13. Six Minus One

The Dynastar engine purred under Zell’s calves and thighs: reliable, a good workhorse, fast, not a trace of grind in its cadence. Good job, too. He and Irvine had left Deling in an unmarked SeeD car in darkness, at the wolf’s hour, and run for over twenty-four hours with barely a break, first one and then the other sleeping on the back seat, as they skirted Galbadia Garden’s original site and navigated round rocky outcrops before curving south down the canyon. Irvine was napping again now. Technically it was his turn to drive, but Zell had had to wake him in the middle of the night: they’d strayed too close to a Grendel nest for comfort. The things weren’t car-fast, but they were quick enough, and the two SeeDs had been off-roading at the time through the East Academy forest.

Back on roads now, though, as the sun rose on their second day, so they were making better time. Rinoa hadn’t called, nor had Quistis. By now Selphie must have picked up her messages, must know Squall was missing…

Not that she could help them from Deling, and flying in towards Timber – if there were any civilian flights to be had – would be a clear sign to the G-Army that they were about to be tackled. This job was down to him and Irvine.

Zell glanced in the rear view mirror at Irvine, flat on his back on the rear seat with his hat over his face. Well, if one of them were going to get more sleep now, it had better be Irvine: he was fussier about his rest. Zell could sleep anywhere, at any time, as could Squall. Difference between close-range and distance weapon specialists, maybe.

Squall had better be taking plenty of chances to rest right now.

Squall had better be alive right now.

Yeah, Rinoa had said he wasn’t dead. She’d promised the high heavens he wasn’t dead. Just… vanished.

Zell had better start believing her.

*

Irvine stared at the inside of his hat and counted, one, two, three, four, the steps required to unload, clean and reload a hand gun, the finger motions he would make to do it, the time taken for each step. He ought to be asleep. The car seat was soft, rocking him cradle-like.

He’d been in his cradle just after Galbadia first sacked Timber. He wasn’t sure where he had come from, as Edea had never been told, but ‘orphaned in Galbadian expansion’ was her best guess, so his birth parents might easily have called the Timber region their home. Expansion: such a polite word for mass murder and land-grabbing.

Squall’s mission had been to keep his head down and his presence undetected. If the new Galbadian advance had crossed his path, keeping his head down might have been a sure way for him to lose it.

Irvine had seen more of the G-Army than any Balamb SeeD, for the long-standing arrangement between Galbadia’s army and Galbadia Garden took senior personnel and NCOs from both organisations across each other’s lines all the time. Testing out from Galbadia Garden meant a quick ticket into the army’s top hierarchy. A job for life.

Graduating from Galbadia meant joining up with the people who had probably killed his parents, and, having heard G-Army jokes up close, the people who’d probably laughed about it while they did so. No, siree. Irvine Kinneas had never wanted to risk passing Galbadia Garden’s final exam, hence why he’d never taken it.

The D-District prison lurked in his memory, a gargant as hideous as any of Ultimecia’s creations, and born of mere human cruelty. He’d only seen it. He hadn’t been locked up in it. “Zell,” he said, hat still over his face.

“Yo?”

“How far to Timber?”

“Twelve more hours if we push it.” He heard Zell twist sideways in the driver’s seat. “He wasn’t in Timber proper, though.”

“I know.”

“He might have been anywhere for miles around.”

“I know.”

_We’re never going to find him_, they didn’t say.

*

Selphie stared again at the note Irvine had left her in their dead drop. Rereading it for the eighteenth time over the past day, upside down and back to front, wouldn’t change the words. She lit her newest candle on her kitchenette counter, orange-blossom with side tones of tutti frutti, and, once the wax was well-melted, held the note into the flame.

She sipped her espresso. If she were a real investigative journalist, she would have sources all over Deling City and in the Galbadian regions. She would have sources in Timber. She could call them, beg for information. Missing: one SeeD commander, last seen undercover.

If, if, if. Squall had given her a job to do – to dig up dirt on Hahn and Deling. She should do her job, and leave him with one thing less to worry about.

Hyne in the stars, she missed him.

*

Quistis opened Rinoa’s bedroom curtains. Deling City’s most upscale rooftops spread out in front of her in the dawn-light, street after street of the rich and the comfortably corrupt. She raised binoculars to her eyes.

“You’re not the maid, Quisty,” Rinoa mumbled from the big bed.

“I’m just looking.” Looking at rooftops, chimney pots, dormer windows, fancy crenellations. Far too many places to hide. She would have to bring in Aliss to perform sniper checks each night. Irvine’s absence only underlined how difficult it was to cover every possible line of attack.

Especially with Seifer’s considerable talents applied on the other team.

“Any change?” she asked over her shoulder.

“No.” Rinoa sat up in bed. “That part of my head is spinning. Trying to latch on, but there’s nothing for it to catch.” She swallowed a sob.

Quistis abandoned her window vista and perched on the side of Rinoa’s bed. “What colour is grass?”

“Green – I’m not concussed, Quisty.”

No; that would have been easier. “Any hankering to put on a fancy hat and grab Galbadia by the throat instead of the ballot box?”

“You mean, apart from having hired SeeD years ago to do just that?”

This was becoming awkward. “You see a runaway freight train about to crush a Galbadian Army car. What do you do?”

Rinoa sent her a baleful stare. “What do the Centran Regulations say about notification to neutral parties when prisoners of war are captured?” Quistis looked away.

“Should we pull Selphie in?” Rinoa asked after a silent minute.

“We mustn’t. She’s been invaluable where she is: we can’t jeopardise her cover.”

Rinoa made a confirmatory noise, and wandered into the bathroom. Quistis stared at the bedroom, three women’s belongings now scattered across it, face creams and physiotherapy bands and carefully-constructed fake official documents and other such flimflam. Xu and Quistis’s Garden-issue laptops, on their cots, looked blocky and awkward next to Rinoa’s civilian version.

Xu could ask Hummingbird to locate Squall. She ran the source; if Quistis just told her…

Quistis, staring at the twin laptops, made up her mind.

*

Seifer, in shirtsleeves in his Viper Building office, flipped over the newest reports from the Timber front. He’d spent half a day calling for reports, only to get this unreadable mess. Hyne, how these people yakked on and on: over-complication here, gobbledegook there. Tell a man what was actually happening and be done with it, he’d always preferred.

_41269_ popped out of the next page.

And there came the paydirt. Seifer set aside the sheets on suspected local shaved-ice-smuggling (with secret messages inside, because, Hyne, no one wanted sweet treats just for their own sake), and picked up the next one down.

_SeeD operative apprehended in the vicinity of East Oak Bend, having destroyed a Titan MBT, four Ramuhs and seven APCs, with loss of all hands. Ten rebels were apprehended in the same operation. Under questioning, the SeeD gave his name as Storm Raine, ID 41269. Captain Marshallin has prepared a bulletin for Balamb Garden’s eyes and is holding it in readiness._

The name was wrong, sure. The ID number had been branded on his brain for years, the staggering level of applied violence was deliciously familiar, and the report timing matched up with the moment Rinoa had briefly grabbed his mind.

Easy to see why Leonhart was operating incognito; with Rinoa politicking in Deling City, it would be so _embarrassing _were her knight picked up for fomenting rustic dissent. Not to mention the international mortification of connecting Esthar’s president, in the person of his son, to internal Galbadian insurrection.

He’d worked in Army Intelligence for long enough to know how _questioning_ proceeded. Leonhart was a tough nut, no doubt, but one who’d been picked up thirty-one hours ago. (How in hell had it taken _thirty-one hours_ to get one piddling report?)

Had Balamb Garden been sent notification that Leonhart was in Galbadian custody, Seifer’s mole there would have told him. Garden would have talked about nothing else. Leonhart had always been a by-the-book, all-rules-and-regs sort, not the kind of man to bullshit his way out of trouble; one who was, presumably, still holding out on Captain Marshallin.

A tough nut, but not uncrackable.

“Jordan!” he called out of his office door towards his ADC.

“Yes, sir?”

“Any air transports heading for the south front before o-nine-hundred?”

Jordan’s fingers clicked over computer keys. “Yes, Colonel. In forty-five minutes, from Vincenza Hill. Shall I tell them you’re coming?”

“Please. I wouldn’t want to miss my flight.” He smiled at his reflection in the filing cabinet. All he could see was his own teeth.

“Shall I check scheduled return transports, sir?”

“No.” Seifer rose and pulled on his uniform jacket. “I’ll be driving back. I’ll have cargo.”

*


	14. The God Of Vengeance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: torture, lots and lots of swearing.

There had been another morning, another hellish dawn of bloodshed. Just one, probably. Squall could not be certain. Time was broken into irregular fragments, like shards of a mirror. Sleep deprivation and fever and the bone-deep cold bled him dry of thought.

There had been two new captains; one was cajoling and generous, letting him sit, offering him coffee and military biscuits, back in the first interrogation room where he’d squeezed swollen eyes closed against the light, and when the gentle, friendly voice had described future procedures in disgusting detail he had prayed to sink into the floor and vanish. The other was only the fourth woman Squall had ever seen in the Galbadian armed forces. He shrank from the memory of her voice.

_“Are there people who might want you back? Or who might want some small pieces?”_

What remained of him did not matter, huddled at the back of the world in a pool of blood. What happened to his body did not matter. He’d be dead before too long. The constant cycle of sweating and shivering, and infection’s smell in his ankle, told him that. Dead people couldn’t remember how they died.

_“Everyone who might have helped you is gone,”_ she’d said, so close to the bitter ice he’d used as armour in the past. _“You have no friends, no help coming. This is all that’s left.” _Racking pain and burning flesh and he’d come so close to begging her to kill him –

Footsteps again. Getting closer. No, not me, please, not me. Someone else. No, not someone else, _never _anyone else. Go away. Go away.

“Hey, 11-D,” a voice said from the corridor. “You got a special visitor. Look grateful, now.” Two of the soldier-guards entered. They bent, cuffed his hands behind him. Funny, really. He was no threat at all.

“You stink,” one of the two said in conversational tones. “Your visitor won’t like that.”

“Take him back to I-4,” the other grunted.

One kicked his ruined ankle as they lifted him, and dizziness whisked the world away, until water, blisteringly hot, cascaded onto his swollen back and thighs. He wailed, an animal sound he barely recognised, and curled his left knee to his chest.

This time this time _this_ _time_ it stopped. Squall shivered into the floor. A whimper lurked at the back of his throat. The shocks would come next. Pray Hyne his heart gave out this time.

A door opened. More boots, entering. Fingers gripping his hair, leather-gloved hand tilting him towards the light; a face swimming into view, fringed by blond hair, out of focus, a fogged-up mirror. A fingertip circumnavigating a welt on his cheek.

“Well, look who’s here.”

A voice shot with amusement like a tiger on the prowl, a familiar voice, a voice that couldn’t possibly be here _oh Hyne it’s Seifer I’m compromised_

The fingers dropped him back to the floor. “He’s definitely a SeeD, in case you had any doubt,” Seifer’s voice said from way above him. “How much has he said?”

“Not a word for the best part of sixteen hours,” the captain who’d played ‘good cop’ answered. “Not a comprehensible one, anyway.”

“I’m not entirely surprised.” A foot nudged his cracked ribs. “I’ll be transferring this one to the D-District. Thanks for taking care of him in the meantime.”

“You’re welcome.” A pen scratched on paper. How he loathed the sound of a pen scratching on paper.

“Just find him some clothes. I’m not driving a naked man halfway across Galbadia: it’ll give people ideas.”

The figures over him withdrew, leaving him to the black hole opening in his gut. Mission failed. Years of work, gone. His friends gathered in Deling City, in a deadly danger they wouldn’t see till too late. All because Seifer Almasy had picked this precise moment to slouch back into his life.

Rough hands uncuffed him, pulled clothing round him, reapplied the cuffs. “He can cast paramagic,” the captain said in cautionary tones. “We have an anti-magic field here, but you wouldn’t want his dragon to come back when you get him outside.”

“Then gag him. A man has to be able to speak to cast.”

A rag slid between his teeth and lips minutes later.

Two of the soldiers yanked him upright and dragged him, right ankle bouncing agonisingly over the floor, through the frontmost door, into a part of the jail he had never seen. Fresh air wafted in from an open door somewhere.

He couldn’t see Seifer. He could hardly see anything. _Keep watching the soldiers, keep watching where they take you. Remember training_. It faded to mist, a mantra without meaning.

Brightness widened in front of him, too quickly, robbing him for precious seconds of the last of his sight. The outside. A door, two motionless figures with heavy rifles. The outside. The prison courtyard –

With a glitter and a twist, here and not here, magic’s shimmer slid back towards him. Spells, useless spells, tangles of energy he could not hold. Bahamut, roaring from the Guardians’ realm, caged and frustrated. Shiva, stretching out a hand he could not take. Tiny thrum, below the Guardian Forces and more profound: Rinoa. He could sense no emotion from her; he never could unless they were close together. She could sense as little from him. She would know he was alive, but not that he was injured.

Would Rinoa be able to track where he was being taken?

The soldiers dragged him to a car standing in the small courtyard, designed for prisoner transport, for its rear was a cage devoid of comfort. Heavy hands shoved him inside and onto a steel bench, clipped his cuffs to a bolt on the bodywork, slammed the door on him. A few words echoed in from outside, Seifer offering cheery farewell to the captain. The two front doors clicked open, admitting Seifer in the driver’s seat and a Galbadian trooper in the passenger seat. Warm rumbling. The car began to roll forwards.

“_Welcome to G-Nav, Pro Edition_,” a sat-nav’s auto-generated voice squawked from the front of the car.

The trooper swallowed a guffaw. Seifer’s head turned towards him. “You have something to say, Harper?”

“N-no, sir.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“_After twenty yards, turn left. Turn left._” The car banked sharply leftwards and accelerated.

The trooper shifted in his seat. “The next advance will block the road through Timber and Cattle Cross,” Seifer said. “No way will I go near that. We have to go northwards round the lake.” Trooper Harper grunted comprehension.

“_After one hundred yards, turn right, Rose Way._”

“_Turn right._”

The car settled into an easy cadence. Squall leant his head on the hard bodywork…

“_After four hundred yards, enter the roundabout, and take the second exit. GD201 towards Obel Village._”

The world swam back up to meet him.

“_Enter the roundabout, take the second exit._”

He could see a tiny stretch of the road ahead, a rural road looping and curving along ancient byways and historical land boundaries, here and there cutting into a straight stretch built by the Galbadian Army. Nothing to each side; nothing but a ride into oblivion.

“_After one hundred yards, turn right, GC108 towards Angel’s Turnpike and Dollet, then take the second left._”

“_Turn right, then take the second left. GC108 towards Angel’s Turnpike and Dollet._”

Don’t think of the future. The sat-nav’s droning gave him something else to think about. Concentrate on that instead. Left… that would have been turning out of the prison yard. Right onto… Rose Way. Across a roundabout and onto a road substantial enough to have a designated number. Rightwards onto a wider road, which then swung to the left, for Seifer hadn’t signalled a leftward turn.

Time ran together, minute by minute. So inconsiderate of it. So ungrateful. It had been noon, or thereabouts, then it was midnight, then afternoon, then dawn – dawn meant a new horror; he shrank from dawn –

“_After four hundred yards, turn right, Half Moon Beach._”

Hyne-damned sat-nav, shaking him back awake.

“_Turn right, Half Moon Beach_.”

The car spun rightwards. Squall slid off the bench seat and partway to the floor. His damaged ankle hit the bodywork panel in front of the seat. Agony blossomed up his leg, and he wailed into the cloth over his mouth.

The car slowed, and pulled over to the side of the road. “Check on him,” Seifer said from a very long way over Squall’s head.

With a clink, the gate between front and rear of the car opened, and the trooper climbed inside. “He’s just fallen,” the man grunted, and stooped towards Squall’s legs. “Come on, you can get up –”

Blackness, deeper than light, engulfed the car floor, and a scythe glittered in the air. The trooper let out a tiny sigh and folded up where he stood.

A hand pushed the man’s dead body sharply aside. Seifer scrambled through the gate, hoisted the trooper onto the second bench seat and bent to Squall’s legs. _Scan_ magic whispered from his fingertips. “Hyne, this is a mess,” he muttered, a voice that swayed as the world swayed, bending all credulity.

An arm slid underneath Squall’s, and the handcuffs came free. He would have fallen to the car floor, but Seifer caught him and lowered him down, and moved his head close enough that his face came into focus.

“Squall. If either of us throws a _Curaga _on you, you will never walk on that foot again. Do you understand?” The same old rules, the ones training had drilled into them both. Squall nodded, or tried to. He must have succeeded, for Seifer pulled the gag from his mouth.

He couldn’t speak and couldn’t have cast, not then, just swallowed air. Seifer loosened his clothes, started to remove them with more haste than gentleness, curses spurting from him in undertones. _Cure_ magic, tightly focused, splashed onto his upper body, settling against cuts and scalds, re-knitting bones and flesh.

“I came as soon as I found out where you were,” he said as he slit Squall’s trousers from his left leg. “Stubborn bastard that you are, knew you’d be in trouble…” Potion dribbled onto his thigh and calf. Numbness spread after it, skin-deep.

Squall swallowed a couple of times and choked on a word. The next dose of Potion went down his throat, soothing tattered vocal cords. “_Regen_,” he croaked.

“It shouldn’t do you too much harm.”

The spell hissed against his right leg, against bruises and burn marks, and into the open ankle wound. A tiny piece of shrapnel plinked out of the gash and onto the car floor, followed by evacuating pus. More _Regen_ strands wreathed his foot, searching for bone to push back into position, finding nothing, moving on rather than knotting the remaining bones together. “Good,” Seifer muttered. He moved away. A rustling noise followed, and a hiss of, “Happy now we’ve rescued someone?” Squall, trembling, reached out to Shiva, in experiment more than desire to summon her. Her distant essence touched his mind but in no sense could he have controlled her approach.

Seifer reappeared beside his head. “We don’t have time to fix you up.” The words were becoming clearer, all senses sharper. “Any Army vehicle comes this way and sees us stopped, we’re screwed. Get you into this…” He hoisted Squall part-upright. Something hard slid over his right wrist and arm. The Galbadian trooper’s jacket-cum-breastplate. Comprehension followed too many seconds later, and Squall, shaking, manoeuvred his misbehaving left arm backwards and approximately into position.

Re-dressing hurt, moving hurt, breathing hurt. _Focus_. He passed out again when Seifer pulled the Galbadian’s armoured trousers over his injured right leg, and came to in the car’s passenger seat. The sea rolled in a few yards in front of the car’s nose, and spray flew into the air, thrown up by waves crashing on seashore rocks. Seifer was striding back towards the car. Why get out?

“Dumped him,” he explained as he got back into the driver’s seat. “One more body in the sea’s just another dead insurgent.” _Resistance member_, Squall thought, but he gave a weak nod.

The car pulled out and slid away. North, probably; the sea was on the right. The world was still spinning, or he was spinning, caught in a tidal bore. “Don’t die on me now, Squall,” he thought he heard Seifer say, but the words were distant and the intent more so. The _Regen _spell creeping up and down his leg reduced all sounds to unimportance. No more aggravating sat-nav voice. His eyes slid closed.

He opened them again some time later when the car slowed and a radio beeped. “Colonel Almasy speaking,” Seifer said, crystalline sound, echoing around. “Where? OK. Thanks for the heads-up. Keep clear for now till you can divert a spare battalion. You know what _one _of them did last time. No, I’m nowhere near. I’m good.” A brief sign-off followed.

The car pulled in to the side of the road. “This is end of line,” Seifer said, words swimming around in the air, incomprehensible. “Kinneas and Dincht are chasing down here. I had word of them this morning, further north, heading this way. They’re less than five miles out now. I’ll do what I can to confuse reports of where you all go next.”

“Why are you doing this?” Squall breathed.

Seifer’s green eyes pinned him for a long moment, momentary uncertainty, growing resolution. “You should pay more attention, Leonhart.” The car accelerated again, then swung onto a tiny side road among trees. A few yards away, no more, hulked the outskirts of another ruined village.

The car stopped. Seifer leapt out, hurried round to the passenger side and lifted Squall from the car. He tried to put his left foot down, to take some of his own weight, but it folded under him. Seifer hissed in something between frustration and worry, and he set Squall down under a sycamore’s yellowing canopy, the Galbadian soldier’s gun on his lap.

“Time for us to kiss and part. You’ll have to send one of your Guardians up to alert Dincht and Kinneas. My mistake. Can you summon?”

“Yes.” He thought. He hoped. “Seifer…”

“No point wishing things were different – life is what it is. We do damage control from here.” He squeezed Squall’s hand for half a second, and strode away to his car.

The car’s engine rose and fell, fading to nothing. Alone. If only Seifer’d stayed… He could have sprung anyone from that prison. Everyone. Squall shivered. Cold. Too cold.

Cold…

He closed his eyes and reached within.

Shiva’s tall, pale form sprang up from his hands, from his essence, leaving him shaking and spent on the leaf-litter. For a moment, as he drifted in and out of consciousness, he thought she stretched a hand towards him, but her fingertips scratched the earth instead, marking his position in Diamond Dust, and she leapt away into the sky, casting a trail of tiny sparkling crystals behind her.

The world faded, dark shadows occluding its edges, leaving a circle of light at its centre. Squall fumbled the trooper’s gun in nerveless fingers. He should have asked Seifer to leave the gun barrel pointing at himself. He might not be able to turn it if he had to.

Growling rise-and-fall of a car engine. Passing his position, heading on by. Shimmer-rustle, Shiva stirring in and out of his head. Ice scoring his brain. Should ice his foot: then he wouldn’t be able to feel it. Should ice…

Another car engine, whining towards him. Crunch and crackle as it pulled off-road. Doors slamming open, feet sprinting. Voices crying out, near and far at the same time, “Squall! Dear sweet gods, what the _hell_…” Hands, swift and desperate, touching him.

He cracked open his eyes. Irvine, sporting an expression of barely controlled horror: Zell, a hot tear on his cheek and _Scan_ falling from his lips. “Thank Hyne,” Squall whispered.

He must have blacked out for a moment, for he found himself staring at the jumbled leaves, tilted into recovery position, with no awareness of having got there. “We can’t _Curaga_,” Zell was saying, somewhere overhead. “The worst triple-damned mess…”

“Cut his things off, immobilise the foot,” Irvine answered. “We’ll have to drive clear –”

“Fine, fine. _Fuck_ this; how could anyone…” Zell swallowed another sob. He’d always cried easily.

Squall flexed his left hand and tried to push himself upwards. Slim fingers wrapped round his wrist. “Stay there,” Irvine said. “Just let us do everything.”

He opened his eyes again. Their faces wavered in front of him. “Going to have to leave it to you,” he mumbled. Far too much. Far too much, all on them.

Zell cupped his bruised face in one hand. “It’s OK now, baby. We got you.” And he was here and warm and real and Squall felt the world sway, back at the edge of collapse.

Irvine withdrew, and re-emerged overhead hauling a standard-issue field medicine kit. Buckles began to pop, kevlar to unwind. “Squall,” he said, “we’re going to get this off you, wrap you up –”

“Don’t cut the uniform.” Squall groped for the scissors floating about somewhere above him. “We need it. Get it off me intact.”

“If you say so.” Irvine slid the two halves of a stretcher together under him with the barest of movements. “Hyne on a pogo stick,” he muttered to the unravelling breastplate. “Who threw these _Cures_ up here? Thank the stars they missed your foot –”

“He was aiming. Seifer. Broke me out.”

Zell’s hands, on Squall’s waistband, stilled, and his face reappeared, disbelieving. “He’s G-Army intel. _Second in command _of it.”

“Seifer broke me out.” Squall shook his head. “Don’t know. Don’t ask. Don’t think.” Don’t think, as they pulled the uniform from him bit by bit and tossed the components aside, as they pushed the trousers down his legs till they hung on his calves: don’t think, that he was near-naked again beneath the emergency blanket they were draping over him, that they were too close to him, that they were seeing wounds first seen on a _Scan_, wounds they couldn’t just wish away.

Zell’s hand slid to Squall’s right knee and hesitated. “I don’t know… This will –”

It would what? Hurt? He swallowed a laugh. “Everything fucking hurts. Just do it.”

A strip of leather slid into his mouth: from Irvine’s holster, for it smelt of black powder and resin and home. He bit down. Armoured fabric moved and agony lanced up his leg and he cried out, cringed from the figures hanging over him, but the tiny sobbing of, “_I’m sorry I’m sorry Squall I’m so fucking sorry_” cut into the darkness, and he groped for a hand, and found two.

“Take notes,” he said to the ground, “or just record me talking.” Zell’s strong fingers withdrew and a phone beeped. Pray to Hyne’s angels that the camera wasn’t pointing at him. “After one hundred yards, turn right…”

He kept going till he’d recited the sat-nav’s directions up to Half Moon Beach, while Irvine juggled bandages and lightweight _Cures_, and Zell’s spare hand massaged Potion fluid into his torso. “We go south and find this ‘Half Moon Beach’,” he finished, “then follow the directions in reverse. That’s it.” He shivered into the stretcher beneath him. His voice hurt.

“That’s what?” Irvine said from the vicinity of his knees.

“We go back.”

Zell shook his head, frantic and disjointed. “Uh-uh. No, no, no. We are calling _straight _for medevac –”

He pushed himself up onto his right elbow. “We are going back _now_ or by Hyne I will demote you both.”

Irvine’s face appeared next to Zell’s. “Why?”

“Twenty other people. We go back.”

Zell looked set to say more. Irvine nudged him. “We go back.” He slid an arm under Squall’s shoulders and eased him down again. “How?”

Squall plucked at the G-Army uniform. “You put this on, take him inside at gunpoint.” He jerked his head at Zell.

“The simple plans are the best.” Irvine unhooked his belt flask and held it to Squall’s lips. He sipped. Water, not whisky. Too soon the flask withdrew, but Irvine brought it back moments later, with rehydration salts added.

“Fuck,” Zell whispered to Squall’s right ankle. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.” A continuing stream of “fuckity, fuck, fuck,” and “piss on all Galbadia,” followed, to the syncopated accompaniment of a splint’s velcro.

A needle slid into his calf and he almost cried out, almost kicked out, but it was _Zell _and he was _helping_ and numbness, blessed nothing, began to spread down towards his foot. The world swirled, for a moment or a lifetime, into a pale vortex sheeted with flower petals. He fell limply into Irvine’s grip.

Antiseptic’s stink trickled to his nose and he opened his eyes again. “_Esuna_,” Irvine suggested, still overhead.

“Elixir,” Squall croaked. “Or Remedy. Straight on the gash.”

“Remedy,” Zell decided. “Elixir would be as bad for the joint as _Curaga_.” A floral fragrance drifted across him. Better than the smell of burnt skin, body waste and infection.

Velcro’s hiss-zip meant Zell was splinting his foot and ankle. _Regen _magic hissed back into his leg, bridging the gap between nightmare and miracle. Irvine slipped a clean shirt around him: Zell’s, for it was generous on him. “Warm,” Squall mumbled.

“You mean feverish.” Scissors snipped at fabric. “I hope you appreciate my noble sacrifice. Zell’s legs are a lot shorter than yours.” Loose fabric, trousers with a seam slit, slid over his immobilised right foot.

Zell’s left hand cupped his chin till he focused upwards. Wiry fingers hovered overhead, brandishing a syringe. “Open up.”

Squall shifted his mouth sideways, evasive action. “What is it?”

“Morphine.”

The only times he’d heard a better word involved a Phoenix summon. “Give me a half dose. I need to be alert when we arrive.”

“You’re the boss.” He held the syringe out, and Squall drank. The world began to drift, warm, secure, and after a brief conversation between Irvine and Zell (he couldn’t hear, but he didn’t have to, for he knew them well enough to fill in the details, Irvine advocating caution, Zell the fast and hard approach), strong arms lifted him, and a car roof appeared overhead, and the car began to move, a gentle rock-a-baby motion, and he closed his eyes.

*

Something had changed, Squall realised, swimming out of sleep. No rumble and rock underneath his head. The car had stopped. That was it.

“We here?” he murmured.

“We’re close,” Zell whispered back. “We pulled off road. Think we’re half a mile out, no more.”

“OK.” He struggled upright.

A hand – Zell’s, strong – snaked out to grip his wrist. “You’re going nowhere.” Squall glared at him, and at Irvine, in the front passenger seat, dressed in the Galbadian trooper’s uniform. Irvine gave him a grim nod.

“Simple plan. You’re no part of it.”

Squall waved at the stand of trees outside the car window. They were barely visible, black outlines against a starry sky: it was full dark, and the car’s lights, interior and exterior, were switched off. “Then _Float_ me into a tree and give me a spare gun. I’d be a sitting target in here for any passing troops doing a sweep.”

Zell and Irvine glanced at each other, then nodded. “OK,” Irvine said, still speaking quietly. “Just promise me you’ll only fire in self-defence. What are our mission objectives?”

Squall took a couple of deep breaths. Commander mode. Feelings were irrelevant. “Primary objective, kill or drive off every Galbadian soldier, and free every prisoner. The cells are towards the back of the building: you’ll need to go through it –” past or through the interrogation rooms: how he hated the concept of them being anywhere near those rooms – “to find them. There are Army vehicles garaged on site. Load a few of them with prisoners, find someone fit to drive, get them _out _of there.”

“How many Galbadians?”

Feelings were irrelevant. Let go of feelings. “I never saw more than two officers per shift. Assume three or four. At least fifteen grunts per shift. Basic weaponry carried inside the jail – the officers have pistols – heavy rifles on the front door guards. They have anti-magic…”

“We know,” Zell said. “That’s how Rin figured you were in trouble.”

Small comfort. “Find the on/off switch early doors. The soldiers focus on their own duties: you should be able to catch them out for long enough to make first strike.”

He nodded, all focus. “When’s shift change? Do you know?”

Yes and no. He could guess only by the sun, and by when he’d seen and hadn’t seen each captain. “Eight am and eight pm – I _think_. Might be wrong.”

Irvine flicked on his watch for half a second. “It’s half past eight now. We should wait till nine. Make sure the last shift have all gone.”

Zell reached for the car door. “I could go scouting –”

“No,” Irvine said. “I will. Uniform.” Zell nodded, the tight frustrated motion of a man who wanted to be _moving_.

“You have other objectives,” Squall cut in. They snapped back to attention. “Secondary objective – they make records on paper. They’ll copy them to computer, sure, but maybe not immediately. Find the storage office. Retrieve what records you can: it’s criminal evidence. _Fira_ whatever you can’t carry. There’ll be names in there of people still at liberty whom Galbadia would want to take in. Deny them what information we can’t preserve for ourselves.” There was other evidence, harder to take away, harder for Galbadia to destroy. Bodies and more bodies under the turf outside.

Both SeeDs nodded. “What else?” Zell asked.

“Tertiary objective, retrieve Lion Heart from impound if you see it. That’s all.”

Irvine saluted him, slipped out of the car and melted into the scrub and the darkness. Zell clambered out and opened the rear door. “I’ll find you a decent branch.”

He spent five minutes or so shimmying up and down trees before he seemed satisfied, tiny noises in the dark, noises Squall clung to, _you are not alone now_. When he came back, he cast _Float_ on Squall’s ankle before helping him out of the car, and climbed up into the tree with him, settling him with his back to the trunk, his right leg stretched out on a thick branch and the Galbadian trooper’s gun on his lap (trust Irvine never to discard a firearm without reason). They sat together in the dark, heads touching, not speaking. Zell’s arm slung round Squall was an anchor.

Faint noises below, scratch of boots on fallen leaves, made Zell pull clear and tense his upper body muscles. A tiny caw floated upwards from a few feet to their right, something like a baby owl’s hoot, if owls walked on two feet.

“All clear,” Irvine said in an undertone, something a little more than a whisper. “I saw the last of the morning shift driving back to housing a few minutes ago.”

Zell wriggled sideways and dropped to the underbrush. Squall leant over his branch after him. “Zell. Irvine.” He felt more than saw them come together beneath the tree. “Conditions… are bad in there. I need you to maintain professional standards of objectivity.”

Silence answered him at first. “Yes, sir,” Irvine said, breaking it.

“Zell.”

“I hear you, Squall,” Zell said, somewhat sulkily.

The two of them pussy-footed away towards the prison. Squall sighed and leant back against the tree. That _Regen_ was starting to wear off, or maybe the morphine was, or the local anaesthetic, or all three at once. Zell lost his cool far too easily for this kind of job…

Well, at the worst, Irvine could let him off a metaphorical leash and do the objectivity parts himself.

If the half-mile estimate had been accurate, he’d be able to hear the gunshots clearly enough to tell Exeter apart from Galbadian rifle or machine pistol fire. Two of them on their own against eleven to sixteen opponents – it wasn’t a suicide mission, no, but it came close. The waiting, the waiting was always the terrible part, for the CO left behind –

He’d waited for interminable hours in that jail. Irvine and Zell were there to end that terror for others.

Minutes passed, minutes where he began to shiver (cold or fear or fever, he could take his pick), where Shiva shifted in his mind and flung insubstantial arms around him, where he shook her off for fear that she would take the wrong memories this time. Had Irvine’s credentials been challenged on the way inside? Had Zell been recognised as something far different from a local revolutionary?

_Crack_, a shot spat out, far away and vaguely leftwards. Exeter, AP ammo. _Crack-crack_.

Squall closed his eyes and squeezed the gun in his hands. He could do nothing now.

More gunfire rang out, Galbadian shots this time, but the volleys continued, peppered by not just Exeter’s answering fire but a strange booming sound. Zell tossing some grenades?

Distant flames flared to the sky, and a thundering crash. No, Irvine and Zell were not alone. They had their Guardian Forces. Specifically, Zell had Ifrit.

Bahamut hissed inside Squall’s head, demanding to fly reconnaissance. Couldn’t. Mustn’t. If Squall drew attention to his position, drew Galbadians to his position, he’d endanger Irvine and Zell.

The flames died down, but the gunfire continued, rising and falling, frenzy and retreat. Exeter’s steady _crack_s rang out, in different cadences as Irvine changed ammo; shotgun, Fire Ammo, one or two rounds of Demolition Ammo (goodness knew why). Irvine was still alive. That was good. Was Zell alive?

After maybe three minutes, the shooting stopped. Squall waited, ears straining into the darkness. The last shot had come from Exeter. Hadn’t the last shot come from Exeter?

An armoured car’s engine whined towards him from the jail’s vague direction, along, presumably, the road off which Zell had driven. Squall listened. The car was speeding, for sure. Closer, closer… past him, and into the darkness, heading north on the long trek towards Dollet. A second car followed a few minutes later, and a third. Then, silence.

The silence lasted for so long that he began to worry, and then to prepare, ears pricked, gun raised into the sheer darkness. Minutes crawled past, measured in heartbeats, in his own hoarse breathing. Where were they? _Where_?

With a crackle and a roar, a pillar of flame launched skywards from the shootout’s direction. Engines squealed again, mil-issue motorbikes, approaching. A crackling, and a scuffle. Running feet. Squall tucked his finger over his gun’s trigger.

Two quick whistles echoed from the trees, Garden’s simplest alert for ‘_friend incoming’_. Squall whistled back, ‘_awaiting evac_’. Seconds later Zell ran up to the foot of his tree.

“_Float _yourself and let’s go,” he called up. Squall tossed away the gun and cast, and Zell helped him downwards.

“Are you both OK? How did it go?” Wrong way round to ask, but he didn’t care.

“We’re good; just needed a couple of _Cures_. Mission successful. Irvine even found Lion Heart.” Zell tucked his left arm under Squall’s right, and pulled him into a light jog, three-legged-race style. “We’re – low on _Curagas_ and _Regens_, though.”

“I’m not surprised.” Zell’s arm tightened in what might have been an embrace.

Irvine got the car in gear as they hurried up to it and pulled out while Zell was still climbing into the back. “I think a tank’s coming,” he said over his shoulder.

“You two lit it a flare,” Squall grumbled. Adrenaline was fading and making his assorted aches, especially the tiger’s roar in his ankle, far harder to ignore.

“Ifrit was a bit pissed off.” Zell helped him lie down and got two seatbelts round him. “Congratulations: it’s morphine o’clock.”

“I’ll take the full dose this time.”

Zell held the syringe to his mouth a minute or so later. He swallowed, and as lethargy spread through him and the car’s motion swayed him back towards sleep, he tucked his head into Zell’s lap, and closed his eyes. Vague sounds intruded later, voices on radios, the routine noises of medevac, but the warmth did not fade, until he woke in Balamb Garden’s infirmary to the sight of Irvine asleep on a recliner by his bed, and the soft feel of Zell curled beside him holding his hand.

*


	15. What A Tangled Web

Irvine sent Selphie an email. It was the kind of love letter he’d bombarded her with in their early days, fit to make her smile at her screen and giggle at his inconsistencies and bombast. He’d got her a very special present, he said, waiting at Balamb Garden. _‘Slightly battered but in one delightful piece… much like yourself.’_

So Squall was safe and she could stop fretting. Fretting was wasted energy that was best put to better use. Part of her brain, newly freed up, settled down to decide whether to go for mochaccino or chai latte this morning. The rest focused back to Arcadia Deling.

Selphie slowly paged through her dossier on Arcadia. Not a breath of a man in her life, nor a woman; no suspicious bankruptcies in her past, or shady loans. There was a mortgage out on her holiday home by the north coast. (A freelance photographer had sent Selphie some long lens pictures of Arcadia surfing.)Tthe list of people who’d rented out the place over the past few years could serve for a list of Galbadia’s Richest People. Why was there a mortgage out on it, and on that apartment in central Deling that she sometimes stayed in when some business acquaintance was using her family home as a party pad? She had enough money in the bank to pay off the mortgages twice over.

Money laundering was the answer. It was always the answer. The _question _was where the dirty money had come from, and whether she was laundering it for herself or someone else, and, in either case, what favours were owed to whom.

And she had a singular love for that little wine bar just behind the Financial Services Authority building, off Sorceress Alaya Street, the one with the Dolletian bouncer with whom Selphie had commiserated after one bar fight too many… and a gaggle of regulators and bankers meet in there to toast each weekend…

What a pity it wasn’t possible to do everything, all at once, all the time.

Why wasn’t that possible? Who made the rules? Stupid rules.

*

It was Friday. Selphie, in a little black dress and blonde extensions, giggled her way into the Grape and Goat wine bar with a wave for the bouncer. She’d already done half of her usual Friday circuit, starting three hours earlier at six p.m. in the wave of work-week teetotals scurrying into their locals for urgent relief. Pace oneself carefully, that was the key. A bowl of nuts here, a packet of Boco-Choco-Bos there. Make sure half the drinks were fizzy water (looks like gin and tonic). Pour the odd bit of real gin and tonic or whisky into someone else’s glass or into a pot plant (poor plant), to disguise how little she actually drank. And listen. Keep listening.

Listen to the governmental secretaries at the Wheatsheaf gossip about which nubile twenty-year-old the interim president had most recently pulled onto his desk. Listen to the army ADCs mutter about paperwork that turned up in the wrong filing cabinet and the intelligence staff (Seifer Almasy, mostly) who yanked it out at exactly the right time to accuse someone or other of pinching it. Listen to the cleaners, overworked and exhausted, complain about who urinated in their office waste bin and who tossed a hundred-gil note in there, set to accuse anyone nearby of theft.

“_Her_ old partner’s over on eight,” the bouncer growled as Selphie walked past. She palmed him a fifty gil note backwards and kept walking. ‘Over on eight’, booth eight, to the right hand side of the taproom (was it called a taproom, given that wine wasn’t poured from a tap? Whatever). Selphie beelined for the bar, on the left hand side. As she waited to order, humming a Friday-feeling song, she watched her reflection in the mirror behind all the bar staff and bottle racks.

She watched booth eight’s reflection.

Yep, it was definitely Arcadia Deling’s former business partner at the Black Moon hedge fund. He had a friend with him; the two were sharing a bottle of Winhill red.

Hmm. The friend was General Hyder. What was General Hyder doing here?

The closest barman handed a few gil in change to another customer and turned an enquiring eye on Selphie. “Icewine!” she burbled. “The Trabian special!” He grinned at her and pulled the bottle out of the fridge.

Selphie paid, accepted her glass and sipped. Yucky stuff, though it was the sweetest (and therefore the nicest) that she knew of, but the bar didn’t sell gin, so she couldn’t fake with another water, and if she had a coffee now she wouldn’t sleep and she really needed to do some of that later on. She sashayed across the floor and grinned at one of the men at the table behind Hyder’s. A little joking got her a seat at the general’s back.

Noise, noise, noise. Listen. Selphie’s admirer toasted her with a huge Centran sherry glass. “Just like a flower…”

“…value of investments may go down,” a posh Deling voice said, behind her. “It will recover, after Ms Deling’s election; her policies will be gold, metaphorically, for the markets.”

“I’d prefer real gold _now_,” Hyder growled.

“…and the bishop said, ‘What about his trousers?’”

“So put it off,” said the posh voice.

Selphie laughed. “Put the trousers on the statue!”

“It’s an _audit_, Frankland. I can’t ‘put it off’.”

“Pah. Auditors.”

“Over that waving little willy…”

“The auditors have Intel behind them. Have you _seen _Markham? He’s an ice-cold bastard and no mistake.”

“So we’ll find a distraction for the good general.”

The group at Selphie’s table raised their glasses. “To the weekend!”

“Here’s to distractions.”

Selphie raised her glass. Sweetest Trabian grapes, picked after freezing, straight down the hatch. She smiled her widest smile.

*

Selphie, clutching an Esthar Broadcasting Corporation microphone, ducked under a fellow journalist’s shoulder and up to Arcadia Deling as she descended the Galbadian Library steps. “Ms Deling; Steffi Tallis for the EBC. Could you spare a few moments?”

Arcadia smiled at her sideways. “A few, yes. Let’s talk on the move. I’m heading to the Farmers’ Union bank for eleven a.m.” She continued to walk, aides and bodyguards at her back moving aside to make room for Selphie to enter the entourage. Selphie, by far the shortest person there including her robed Esthari camerawoman, had to scurry to keep up with Arcadia’s long strides. Let Arcadia play. Selphie didn’t mind. Certainly didn’t mind Arcadia thinking that she was the one setting the ground as well as the pace.

“It’s a sea-change for Galbadian women to see decisive strength rewarded in the public eye,” Selphie mused to her microphone. “Rather than resulting in retribution.”

Arcadia laughed. “I haven’t won yet.”

“Your supporters see the election as a foregone conclusion. Do you admire their certainty or do you think it could lead to complacency?”

“Both, naturally. I can’t allow my strategists to become complacent, and I adore my fans.”

“They’ve certainly made their presence felt. Bandar Iskai, for instance –” a massive G-Pop star – “called on you to transform Galbadia at the end of his set at the Hyperion theatre last night.” Arcadia preened to the camerawoman hurrying along a few yards to the side. “Let’s hope,” Selphie tittered, “that he puts those chocobos of his to good use and runs them in your colours.”

Arcadia’s smile flattened a little. Bandar Iskai was under investigation by the tax authorities for laundering money via his racing stable. Not that that was public knowledge, oh, no, but in the financial world…

“I’ve got a wonderful quote here from the COO of the Farmers’ Union,” Selphie continued. “‘Ms Deling stands on the brink of greatness, for herself and for Galbadia. She will bring the separatists to heel and guarantee a future for Galbadian children.’” She smiled, dazzling teeth aimed at the city skyline. “Do Galbadian children lack a future without you?”

Arcadia leant towards both Selphie and the camera, walking like a little teapot. “I want the best for all of us. The separatists profess to love their regions. Timber, the Shenand Hills, Nanchucket Island. Their actions belie that. Violence against honest Galbadian troops that they allow to spill over into civilian spaces… If they have reasons behind their ideology, let them be reasonable. Let them present their case for consideration. Let them renounce violence and denounce those who commit it. Until then, they threaten our future and theirs.”

“Absolutely,” Selphie said with a nod. “Just yesterday, we all saw images from Obel Village…” She opened a video on her phone, of a clip from the previous evening’s EBC News, and held it up for first the camera to see, then Arcadia. “The temple of Hyne-Leviathan was burnt – oh, that’s a tank driving through it.” A Galbadian Army Ramuh, to be precise. “Hyne-Leviathan is explicitly a female aspect of the divine,” Selphie continued, “so personally I’d question the optics."

Arcadia’s smile dropped. “Those who attack the Galbadian Army are enemies of Galbadia. Those who fail to support the Galbadian Army are enemies of Galbadia. Those who undermine its work are enemies of Galbadia.”

Selphie smiled a gentle smile. “The proposed commission to investigate the Galbadian Army’s commitment to the Centran Regulations – is that enemy activity?”

“It is a distraction. It takes Army attention away from necessary operational matters.”

“And is it necessary for the Army’s operational funding to be backstopped by loyal Galbadian investors?”

Arcadia paused in her power-walk. “Loyalty to one’s country takes many forms, Ms Tallis.”

“Mmm, absolutely. The current Army internal audit – you know all about audits, of course – if Galbadian financiers were found to be holding military funds, they’d ensure those funds lost no value, right?”

“I’m sure.” Arcadia accelerated again. “Thank you, Ms Tallis.”

Selphie smiled as Arcadia retreated. She owed herself a mochaccino.

*


End file.
